Belief in Christ

(S

LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF BELIEF

BELIEF IN CHRIST

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

BELIEF IN GOD *

(Reconstruction of Belief /).
THE EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN.
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT.
THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS.
THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 2 Vols.
THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD

(Bampton Lectures for 1891).
THE BODY OF CHRIST.
DISSERTATIONS ON SUBJECTS CONNECTED

WITH THE INCARNATION
THE NEW THEOLOGY AND THE OLD

RELIGION.

THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH.
ORDERS AND UNITY.
SPIRITUAL EFFICIENCY.
THE PERMANENT CREED AND THE

CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN.
THE QUESTION OF DIVORCE.

Edited by
LUX MUNDI. A series of Studies in the Religiou

of the Incarnation. By Various Writers.

ALL RIUHTS REsia;Vi:i>

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF BELIEF

"BELIEF IN CHRIST

BY CHARLES GORE, D:B,

O

HON. D.D. EDLN. AND DURHAM, HON. D.C.L. OXFORD, HON. LL.D. CAMBRIDGE

AND BIRMINGHAM, HON. FELLOW OF BALLIOL AND TRINITY COLLEGES,

OXFORD, AND FELLOW OF KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON

97530

LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W,

1922

LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE

Printed in Great Britain by
Hcudl, Watson & Viney, Ld. t London and Aylesbury.

PREFACE

1. THIS volume is, again, an appeal to men to think
for themselves, and to think freely. It does not
concern itself with any question of orthodoxy, that
is of ecclesiastical authority. Such questions are
deferred to the next volume, which will concern the
Church, where they will be wholly in place. But
in this volume they are quite omitted.

It is not that I am under the illusion that my
ow r n beliefs, or those of other men, orthodox or
unorthodox, with very few exceptions, have been
actually reached purely or mainly by an argumenta-
tive process. They have been the result of a complex
of movements within the soul, and of influences from
without it, which are largely emotional, moral and
social, and not in the narrower sense intellectual.
But if the resultant belief or theory is to be described
as rational, that must mean that it can account for
the relevant experience in its widest sense, and the
facts of nature and history, better than any other
theory ; and the best way to test the ability of any
theory to do this is not mainly by attacking other
theories, but by approaching the facts constructively
and critically and seeing what theory appears to
emerge out of their free consideration.

Accordingly this volume is an attempt to take a
critical estimate of all the evidence which concerns
the person of Christ, and to show that the belief
about Him which really grows out of the evidence,
taken all together, and which best accounts for all

v

vi BELIEF IN CHRIST

the facts, is just the traditional belief in the incarna-
tion of the eternal Son of God. I seem to see the
intellectuals of my generation, and of the generations
below me, as, for the most part, the victims of a
delusion. What is called " free thought " is really
thought enslaved to a negative dogma, which is not
really valid ; viz. that the sort of redemptive action
of a personal God, which the Bible professes to record,
cannot really have occurred. If the inhibition of
this negative dogma is removed if the enquirer is
again really open-minded then I believe that free
enquiry will be found to establish what is substan-
tially the traditional belief. That is the thesis of
this volume. And, as I say, it is a challenge to
men to think for themselves.

2. The argument of this volume does not begin at
the beginning. It presupposes the conclusion of the
first volume on Belief in God. Every year of my
life makes me more firmly convinced that all the
questions which concern the person of Christ are
really secondary to the question whether the teaching
about God, which was the message of the Hebrew
prophets and of Jesus Christ and His apostles, is
true whether it rests upon a real self-disclosure of
God to men. I have not of course in this volume
repeated the arguments which convince me that so
it is. They constitute the substance of my first
volume. But I should like to call the attention of
my readers to the admirable article on " Theism "
by Dr. A. E. Taylor in Hastings' Encyclopaedia
oj Religion and Ethics, and particularly to its con-
clusion. " In the present generation, 5 ' he says,
" the issues seem to be clearing. Philosophers are
certainly tending, though not without exception, to
range themselves in two camps. Those to whom
the business of philosophy seems to consist mainly,
if not exclusively, in providing a logical basis and a

PREFACE vii

methodology for exact science appear to be identify-
ing themselves with the doctrine of logical pluralism
and taking up a definitely atheistic attitude which
involves the denial of the objectivity of judgments
of value ; those on the other hand who are con-
vinced that the business of philosophy is to make
life, as well as science, intelligible, and consequently
find themselves obliged to maintain the validity of
those categories of worth apart from which life would
have no significance, are, in the main, declared
Theists." This is, I believe, true. But I would add
that philosophy, though it can, working by itself,
substantiate Theism, cannot substantiate the equi-
valent of the Biblical idea of God without the
postulate of a positive self -revelation of God. Nor
can it show the idea of a self-revealing God to be
untenable. And that God has in fact so revealed
Himself, especially through the prophets of Israel and
Jesus Christ, seems to me to be established by the
most cogent reasons. Also the conviction that God
had so done is so manifestly the ground on which
Jesus stood, and on which His Church has always
stood, that I find it very difficult to understand how
any of those who reject this foundation, and depre-
cate the very idea of a positive revelation, can
suppose that the fabric of Christianity would remain
standing.

It is quite true that there were elements in Baby-
lonian, Persian and Greek thought which the Jews
had assimilated before our Lord's time, and that
they were the richer for the assimilation. And it is
true also that Christianity, which is the flower of
Judaism, assimilated more from Hellenism than the
Jews had previously done ; and that it must learn
in like manner to assimilate important elements from
Indian and Chinese and Japanese thought and art
and religion. But this was done of old, and must

viii BELIEF IN CHRIST

still be done, so as to leave as the main constructive
element in the fabric the specific belief in God which
came from Israel. On this Christianity was built and
must stand. This is the assumption of this volume
which I did my best to prove in its predecessor.

But if I live long enough to accomplish my design
I should wish to come back upon the argument of
the first volume and consider at length some of the
criticisms made upon it.

I have done my best to make the argument in this
volume intelligible to those of my readers who are
not used to books of biblical criticism, by putting
into footnotes and appended notes, which they can
omit, some of the more detailed critical enquiries.

Perhaps I ought to apologize for the frequency
with which, at certain points in this book, I have
referred to other writings of mine. But where I had
nothing new to say of much importance, it seemed
better to refer to what I had written elsewhere than
to increase the bulk of this book by repeating it.

C. G.

St. Luke's Day, 1922.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER I

PAGE

THE JEWISH BACKGROUND .... 1

CHAPTER II

THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES . . 34

CHAPTER III

THE FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH AND OF

ST. PAUL .... .70

CHAPTER IV

ST. JOHN AND THE REST OF THE NEW

TESTAMENT ...... 106

CHAPTER V

THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS . .136

CHAPTER VI

Is THE DOCTRINE OF THE INCARNATION

TRUE ? . 162

x CONTENTS

CHAPTER VII

THE DEFINITIONS OF THE COUNCILS CON-

CERNING THE PERSON or CHRIST . .196-

CHAPTER VIII

THE IMPLIED DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY

TRINITY ...... 231

CHAPTER IX

SIN AND THE FALL ..... 25$

CHAPTER X

THE ATONEMENT . . . . . .280

CHAPTER XI

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION .... 306

TABLE OF SUBJECTS ..... 322
INDEX OF NAMES 327

BELIEF IN CHRIST

CHAPTER I

THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

TWICE in the Gospels Jesus is represented as asking
a question bearing upon His own person. The first
occasion was at the opening of what we may call
the second stage of His mission, when an intense
opposition centring in the religious leaders of Israel,
the scribes and Pharisees, had declared itself openly
in Galilee, and the faith of His first eager disciples
was beginning to be deeply tested. 1 Then it was
that, away from the centres of the life of Israel,
almost as a fugitive, in the neighbourhood of a city
beyond the Jordan, whose very name Caesarea
Philippi would strike upon Jewish ears as repul-
sively alien, He pressed upon His disciples the direct
question : " Who do ye say that I am ? " He had
asked them first what people in general were saying
about Him, and that question was easily answered.
It was generally believed that He was someone
extraordinary, of prophetic character and divine
commission. 2 But more than such vague answers is

1 Mark iii 6, 22, vii 1-13, viii 11, 15. The great question is
recorded in viii 27 ff.

8 What exactly was meant by saying He was John the Baptist,
or Elijah, or one of the prophets is not easy to define. It must be
remembered that the Messianic king, the remote descendant of
David, is, as in Jer. xxx 9, Ezek. xxxiv 24, Is. Iv 4, called simply
David ; in like manner a successor of John the Baptist or of Elijah
might be called simply by his name. People might say Here we
have John the Baptist, or Here we have Elijah, over again.

1

2 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

expected of the disciples. The question is again
pressed home : " Who do ye say that I am ? "
And Peter commits himself to the great confession :
" Thou art the Christ."

Once again on the eve of the Passion Jesus is
represented as asking not the disciples, but the
Pharisees l " What think ye of the Christ ? Whose
son is He ? " It was a question not directly about
His own person, but about their idea of " Him who
was to come." But in the minds of the disciples,
who believed Him to be the Christ, it must have
sounded as a question about Himself. And both
these questions asked by our Lord imply that His
person presented a problem which must be raised
and solved. And it is characteristic of our Lord's
generally undogmatic method as a teacher that He
insists that the answer should be found as a judgment
of men's own minds under the teaching of God,
rather than by any explicit pronouncement from His
own lips.

As we know in history, the answer of the first
disciples, who became the Church of Jesus Christ,
was given gradually or in stages. First it was that
Jesus is the Christ. Then that Jesus is Lord.
Finally that Jesus, the Christ, is the pre-existent
Son of God, Himself very God, who for us men
and for our salvation was made flesh. This final
answer was formulated in Creeds and protected by
dogmatic decisions, and became the central point
of the Christian faith.

To-day when the questions of our Lord are quoted
-" W r ho do ye say that I am ? ' " \Vhat think
ye of Christ ? " what is generally intended is to
ask whether the familiar doctrine of the Church

1 As represented in Matt, xxii 41. In Mark xii 35 the ques-
tion is asked of the people, in view of the teaching of the scribes,
" How say the scribes that Christ is the Son of David ? " So in
Luke xx 41. I have retained the more familiar form of the question
as the difference is irrelevant.

WHERE WE START 3

concerning the person of Jesus gives the true answer
to these questions. In our day it is widely questioned
and sometimes scornfully repudiated ; or it is sug-
gested that the precise answer to be given to these
questions does not seriously matter, if only we are
agreed in following the example of the life of Jesus.
But the world cannot settle down to regard Jesus
as nothing more than the best of men or the greatest
of spiritual teachers. Most men feel that there is
something mysterious and unique about His person.
Nor does it seem possible to leave the great question
unanswered. It obtrudes itself upon us and demands
an answer. And if we cannot be content to receive
passively the dogmatic teaching of the Church, but
feel the necessity of opening afresh the question
for ourselves, certainly it is not our Lord who will
condemn us. He certainly would have men think
for themselves, and reach a personal conviction
which they can feel to be wrought into their souls
by God's own Spirit.

The purpose of this volume, then, is to make the
enquiry about Christ's person afresh, with a mind
as open as possible to all sources of evidence, and
with a resolute determination to go " whither the
argument leads." But I shall take for granted the
conclusions reached in the volume which preceded
this on Belief in God. That is to say that I shall
take for granted not only that there is a God in some
sense, but that He has really disclosed Himself to men,
especially in a historical process through the prophets
of Israel and through Jesus of Nazareth, who, what-
ever else He was, was " a prophet mighty in word
and in deed " in the succession of the prophets of
Israel. Thus the God in whom we start by believing
is indeed the one supreme Spirit who is present and
active everywhere in the world, but He is also
beyond the world and above it, subsisting in the
fulness of personal consciousness and will before

I- THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

the world was: awful in holiness and perfect in good-
ness, power, and wisdom : the absolute Creator of
all that is, and the Father and Judge of all rational
spirits. For the justification of this faith I must
refer back to the reasonings of my first volume.
When I say that it will here be taken for granted,
I mean that anyone who is to read this volume
sympathetically and judge of it fairly, must be pre-
pared at least to accept it as a provisional hypothesis
with the consequences which the preceding volume
indicated. He must not have his mind closed by
a dogmatic prejudice against that kind of redemp-
tive action of a personal God to which the Bible
witnesses, or against such special acts of God as we
call miraculous. He must be prepared to follow along
the lines of the growth of the apostolic faith and to
seek with an open mind to appreciate its grounds.

In standing upon this platform to start with, we
have this advantage, that we start where the first
disciples we may say with all reverence where
Jesus Himself started. For the Gospels make it
quite evident that Jesus took for granted the God
of Israel and the religion of Israel, 1 even while He
deepened the thought of God and emancipated the
religion from its Pharisaic fetters. Professor Bethune
Baker has recently said " I know almost nothing
about God's character apart from Jesus." 2 This is
a not unfamiliar position, but it is to me amazing.
Something surely of an important kind about the
character of God had become apparent to deep-
thinking men, like Zoroaster and Aeschylus and
Plato, all the world over, and Dr. Bethune Baker
is surely the last man to wish to ignore these verdicts
of the natural conscience. We owe a great debt of
gratitude to Baron Friedrich von Hugel, who is
always bidding us keep in mind that it was not

1 See Belief in God, pp. 94-5.

a The Modern Churchman, Sept, 1921, p. 301.

THE JEWISH DOCTRINE OF GOD -5

only along the line of Israel that mankind had gained
real knowledge of God. But what is from our
present point of view much more important is that
^ the Jesus of history " would assuredly have utterly
repudiated the supposition that He was to teach
men their first serious lessons about God's character.
He certainly assumed that His hearers knew a great
deal about 'it all, in fact, that the prophets had
told men, for whom the character of God was the
main theme of their mission.

1 will counter Dr. Bethune Baker's statement with
another, 1 which, if somewhat exaggerated in the
other direction, is far nearer the truth than his :
44 In what way did the teaching of Jesus differ from
that of His contemporaries ? Not and the nature
of much modern writing renders it desirable to em-
phasize the negative not by teaching anything
about God essentially new to Jewish ears. The God
of Jesus is the God of the Jews, about whom He
says nothing which cannot be paralleled in Jewish
literature." I think this is an exaggeration. The
teaching of Jesus about the character of God, as
the Father of each individual soul whose love goes
out to seek and save the lost the God in whose
eyes each individual soul is of identical and absolute
value the Father represented in the Parable of
the Prodigal Son is surely fresh teaching. Certainly
our Lord set the character of God in a quite new light
in manifold ways. Certainly also His teaching was no
borrowed or merely traditional teaching. He said 4 ' No
man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to
whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him." But the
God and Father of whom He constantly spoke was
the Jehovah of the Jewish prophets and Psalmists. 2

1 From Drs. Foakes Jackson and Kirsopp Lake, The Beginnings
of Christianity (Macmillan, 1920), vol. i. p. 288.

2 The only word ascribed to our Lord which appears at first sight
to be a repudiation of His Jewish forerunners is John x 8 : " All

2

6 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

There was, in fact, no wavering in the early Church
as to the continuity and identity of their faith with
the old Jewish faith about God. When St. Paul
quotes "the Scriptures," though it be a predominantly
Gentile Church to which he is writing, he means
the books of the Hebrew canon. When he says
" Whatsoever things were written beforehand were
written for our learning, that through patience and
comfort of the Scriptures we might have hope," or
that " every Scripture, inspired of God, is also
profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction,
for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God
may be complete, furnished completely unto every
good work," 1 it is the Hebrew scriptures exclusively
that he is thinking of. Indeed, both in St. Paul's and
St. Peter's Epistles and in St. James and in the Acts
and in the Epistle to the Hebrews the constant
assumption is that the Christian Church was the old
Jewish Church, the Church of the prophets, reformed
and reinspired. This alone accounts for the fact that
the earliest Church put in the foremost place among
its appeals the argument from prophecy.

Thus it came about that the Bible of the Jews
became the Bible of the Christian Church before the
New Testament books were written. It is indeed
astonishing how wholeheartedly the Gentile world,

that came before me are thieves and robbers : but the sheep did
not hear them." But to interpret this single word as a repudiation
of Moses and the prophets and John the Baptist would be in glaring
contradiction to the Gospels generally and to the Fourth Gospel
in particular. See i 7-8, 17, 31, 45, ii 16, iii 10, iv 22,
v 46-7, vii 22-3, viii 56, xii 14-16, 39-41, xix 28, 36, 37.
The mind of the writer of the Gospel is such that he could not have
ascribed to our Lord any repudiation of the ancient prophets.
To interpret this startling saying we must refer back to Jer. xxiii
1-4, and Ezek. xxxiv 1-16, concerning the shepherds (rulers)
of Israel who maltreat and neglect the flock, with whom our Lord
associates the present rulers of Israel, the Pharisees and Sadducees
who are set to harass and persecute His disciples, the sheep who hear
His voice.

1 Rom. xv 4, 2 Tim. iii 16-17.

THE OLD TESTAMENT IN THE CHURCH 7

which came very speedily to constitute the vast
majority of the Christian society, accepted the Old
Testament. There were, no doubt, rebels against
such acceptance in the second century, of whom
the famous heresiarch Marcion was the most im-
portant. He would have discarded the Old Testa-
ment and all that belonged to it as the work not of
the Supreme Being, but of another lower God, the
creator (demiurge) of the material world. He would
have had the Church preach a Jesus who revealed a
supreme and hitherto unknown God, and a Jesus who
had not even a real body of material flesh, such as
must have been a creation of the dishonoured
demiurge of the Old Testament. There are moderns,
amongst whom is Dr. Harnack, 1 who have very deep
sympathy with Marcion, at least in his attempt to
discard the Old Testament out of the Canon. But
the Church teachers would have nothing to do with
his revolutionary proposal. They clung to the Old
Testament. They saw clearly enough that to reject
the Old Testament would be to reject the Jesus of
history who stood without hesitation upon that
platform.

This is all the more noticeable because some at
least of the teachers of the early Church did not,
like those of the mediaeval Church or the Churches
of the Reformation, rate the Old Testament too high.
These Fathers acknowledged frankly that its in-
stitutions of worship were of heathen origin and its
morals to start with on a barbaric level. 2 But
they were full of the principle of God's gradual
working in the education of mankind. He justifies
Himself, they said, by the results. Only by a large
toleration of what was unworthy in a half -barbarous

1 See Harnack, Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (Leipzig,
1921), pp. 248 ff. See also an interesting review of the book by
Lowther Clark in Theology, vol. iii. no. 17.

2 Cf. Lux Mundi, pp. 240-2 and Pref. p. xxii.

8 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

group of tribes, only by a divine patience and
gradualness, could He have educated them up to
the level of the teaching first of the prophets
and then of Jesus. Even St. Augustine, who is
in a measure responsible for the over-estimate of
the Old Testament, says that we wrong the New
Testament if we put the Old on a level with it. 1
Nevertheless all the Fathers saw that the religion
of Jesus Christ is the outcome of a historical process,
and its roots are fixed in Israel. The Old Testament
and the New cohere inseparably. St. Paul is quite
right in saying that as an apostle of Jesus Christ
there has been no change in the object of his worship.
It is still " the God of our fathers " whom he serves
with a pure conscience, 2 and the whole Christian
Church, though in the main Gentile in origin, in be-
lieving in Jesus, knew they were accepting as the true
God the God of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets.

It was the conviction that the self-revelation of
God given through the Hebrew prophets was true and
real that made the Christian Church, when it went
out into the world of the Roman empire, intensely
and deliberately combative not merely for some belief
in God, but for the specific belief inherited from Israel
and consummated in Christ. 3 And this had two very
important results first, that it made impossible for
the teachers of the Christian Church the " deifica-
tion " of their Master.

I

As we have seen, the question for the Christian
Church became very soon Is this Jesus, who is
clearly divine in some sense, really God ? And that
is the question which interests us to-day. And the
answer we give depends for its meaning on what we

1 Aug. de Ocst. Pelag. 15.

2 Acts xxii 14, xxiv 14 ; 2 Tim. i 3.

3 See Belief in God, pp. 108 f., 129 ff., 150 ff.

THE GOD OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 9

understand by God. The world into which the
Church went out used the term God in a very loose
and comprehensive sense. There were Gods many.
The heavenly bodies were unanimously believed
to be Gods, and very formidable Gods too, for
they dominated the world, like remorseless fates. 1
Further, there were deified men in abundance
such as the old hero Heracles, or ancient founders,
like Romulus, or the recent founders of the Empire,
Julius and Augustus, or philosophers who had
brought men the truth. Even the Epicureans
regularly called their founder Epicurus a God. And
the philosophers who believed in a sense in the unity
of God found no difficulty in this wide use of the
term God. For to them, according to the current
Stoicism, God was reason, and reason was God the
reason in all things and the reason in men. Men,
therefore, were portions of God in respect of their
reason. God and man were of one substance. The
more rational a person was the more he became god. 2
There is a curious passage quoted by Origen from
some contemporary writer on the Stoic use of w r ords
who defines a ic god " in its most general sense as
44 an immortal, rational being ; in which sense every
rational soul is a god." Others, he says, add to
the definition that a god must be pure spirit, in
which case human souls will only become gods when
their souls leave their bodies. Others only make
the requirement of moral goodness. 44 So that every
seemly soul is already a god,"' even while it is still

1 See Edwyn Bevan, Hellenism and Christianity (George Allen
& Unwin, 1921), p. 78 : " It was from Babylon that the fear of
the stars and especially of the seven [the Sun and Moon and the
Five Planets] had spread through the Roman Empire. It became
an obsession. This earth, the sphere of their tyranny, took on a
sinister and dreadful aspect."

2 See Bevan, Stoics and Scept'^s, p. 41. The Stoic poet Manilius
is quoted as saying " Quis possit ... Et reperire deum, nisi
qui pars ipse deorum est ? " Cf. Arnou, Le desir de Dieu dans la
philosophic de Plotin (Paris, 1921), p. 145, note 4.

10 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

in the body. Others confine the term god to beings
" who have some control in the world in respect of
its administration, like the sun and the moon. In
a different sense the word is applied to the supreme
administrator. And above all they call god the being
immortal and uncreated, the supreme king, which
is the universe." l The great philosopher Plotinus
in the third century insisted that the root and source
of all things is in unity in the One. But this did
not hinder him from recognizing gods in the sun
and the stars and the gods of popular tradition.
With him also the term God " n'est pas du tout un
terme reserve," 2 and this because reason and God
are the same thing. And thus, because godhead
was comparatively a vulgar thing, Plotinus very
seldom calls his Supreme Being, the One, by the
name God. Rather, as he is above reason, so he
is something above God.

Obviously from this the Hellenic point of view,
it would have been easy and inevitable to deify
Jesus or to call Him a god. How should one
so excellent in power and goodness not be a god ?
I shall have occasion shortly to discuss the position
of the German, Wilhelm Bousset, and his school,
who contend that in the early Hellenistic churches
it was in fact this pagan spirit which came to be
dominant and led to the conception of Jesus as God.

1 This passage is in the Prologue to Origen on the Psalms ; see
Lommatzsch, torn. xi. 351 ; cf. Harnack, Hist, of Dogma (Engl.
trans.), vol. i. p. 119 n., and Inge, Christian Mysticism, App. III.
There is no doubt that this Hellenic use of the term God in a very
wide sense affected some Christian writers, as, e.g., when Clement
of Alexandria speaks of the soul of man by a true knowledge
and righteousness "practising to be god" (^eAerot flvai 8fos,
Strom, vi. chap. xiv. sect. 113); and Greek Fathers sometimes
speak of Christians, in Christ, " being made god " (QeoTroifTiffQai}.
Such language is derived from the common Hellenic use, but it is
not properly Christian. On the whole matter of Hellenic beliefs,
Jules Lebreton's Les Origines du Dogme de la Triniti (Paris, 1919),
chap, i., may be very profitably consulted.

* Arnou, op. cit. pp. 108, 124 f.

JEWISH MONOTHEISM 11

But, even according to this school of critics, this
supposed assimilation of the beliefs and worship of
the Church to the model of the religions about them
was not possible on the soil of Palestine or in the
first Jewish circles of the Church. For these first
disciples the idea of a man being raised to divine
honours was something impossible to entertain. No
doubt the religion of Israel had grown upon the
common soil of Semitic religions, and the terminology
of polytheism slightly taints the Old Testament at
its earliest levels. 1 But this taint had long cen-
turies ago been scrupulously purged away. Only
One could be called God or worshipped by any Jew,
He whom St. Paul in true Jewish spirit calls " the
blessed and only potentate, the King of kings and
Lord of lords, who only hath immortality, dwelling
in the light unapproachable, whom no man hath
seen nor can see." 2 Greeks might identify God and
man, but to an Israelite there was no distinction
so deep and impassable as the distinction of the
Creator from all His creatures, even the highest.

Nor was it at all within the compass of the con-
temporary Jewish imagination that God should mani-
fest Himself in human form. Doubtless there had
been in old days theophanies. God, they read in
the Scriptures, had manifested Himself, as it ap-
peared, even in human form to men. But these
were momentary epiphanies ; they had long ceased ;
and the later theology had explained them away.
There was no tendency of thought among the Jews
of the time after the Captivity such as would have
led naturally towards an idea of incarnation.

II

The dominant thought of the Greek world, when
Christianity came into it, was pantheistic and
1 See appended note A, p. 28. 2 1 Tim. vi 15-16.

12 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

polytheistic, but earlier, as in Aristotle, and later,
as in Plotinus, there was a philosophical monotheism
which believed in the existence of one God absolutely
separated from mundane and human affairs, who
could take no interest in man, and could influence
the world only as an object of desire or intellectual
contemplation. Now the religion of the Jews was
a monotheism, but totally different from this religion
of the philosophers. The one God of the Hebrews,
Jehovah, was thought of as intensely concerned in
the world and in mankind, as constantly active both
in nature and in man. And He had made man in
His own image and likeness, so that the activities
and emotions of the human mind had their source
and counterpart in Him.

That admirable Anglican mystic of the seventeenth
century, Thomas Trcherne, vividly contrasts the
heathen deities who " wanted nothing " with " the
Lord God of Israel, the living and true God," who
44 from all eternity wanted like a God. He wanted
the communication of the divine essence, and persons
to enjoy it. He wanted worlds, He wanted spec-
tators, He wanted joys, He wanted treasures." l
It was because of this divine " want " of an en-
larging fellowship in the divine life and activity that
He had created rational spirits and had appointed
men as His vicegerents in the world to " have dominion
over the works of His hands." 2 But on the widest
scale God had been disappointed in man. Rebellion
on his part had baffled God's purpose. Nevertheless,
God had not abandoned His good mind towards man,
but had proceeded to carry it out by a method of
election.

Again and again God is represented as choosing,
and making covenant with, some selected group to
be the agents of His universal purpose. So it was

1 See T. Treherne, Centuries of Meditations (Dobell, 1908), p. 29.
* Gen. i 28, Ps. viii 5-8.

BELIEF IN DIVINE PURPOSE 13

with the family of Noah, with Abraham, with Isaac,
with Israel under Moses, with the remnant of Israel
who returned, purged and faithful, from the Cap-
tivity. And all this selective method of God, choosing
a small group out of the whole of mankind to be His
instruments, for all its apparent narrowness, had
always a universal purpose, as is declared in the call
of Abraham : "In thy seed shall all the families of
the earth be blessed." This is where Israel stands
distinctive among the nations of the earth 1 in
their intense belief in an energetic divine purpose,
of which only their own nation is the selected
instrument, but which through their nation is to
become the heritage of all the world, and which at
the last, in spite of all the wilfulness of man, is
certainly to take full effect. Because God is God,
at the last shall be the Day of the Lord, when God
shall come into His own in the whole creation.
Thus it is that Israel was the parent of what the
Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce proclaims to be
the only true history, the history which is also
philosophy, which sees the past as alive in the
present and pressing on towards a goal and con-
summation in the future. 2

The Greeks and Romans never discarded their old
legend of a Golden Age in some remote past followed
by a gradual decline age after age, so that they are
almost totally without the sense of a progressive
purpose in the world ; and if their imagination
wanders beyond the present world-order they con-
ceive, more after the manner of the Easterns, of
innumerable cycles of time, each characterized by
gradual deterioration and ending in final catastrophe,
without any divine purpose running through the ages

1 See, however, Note B at the end of this chapter on the idea of
divine purpose in the teaching of Zoroaster.

8 See Benedetto Croce, Teoria e storia delto storiographia (Bari,
1917), pp. 186-92 ; and see Belief in God, p. 132, note 1.

14 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

as a whole and moving on to its consummation. 1
Of this conception of divine purpose running through
all things and destined to final effectiveness in spite
of all failures and catastrophes by the way for
which the rebellion of free spirits is responsible
a divine purpose with which it is man's highest
joy to co-operate of this infinitely fruitful belief in
a divine purpose of progress the religion of Israel is
the effective source.

Ill

This expectation of a kingdom of God 2 to come
is as fully important an element in the Jewish back-
ground of Jesus as the belief in the one only God,
the righteous Lord, the Creator of heaven and earth.
And it is necessary for us to get as clear a picture
in our minds as possible of the great expectation,
as it had been formed in earlier days, and as it was
held at the time of our Lord's birth, education, and
ministry. Let us dwell first on some central and
classical expression of the hope from early times.

Here is one which is common to Isaiah and Micah 3 :

" And it shall come to pass in the latter days, that the
mountain of the Lord's house shall be established in

1 See Bevan, Hellenism and Christianity, pp. 180ff. : "In
some form or other this idea, that the present is vastly inferior
to an ideal past, seems to have been general in classical antiquity.
In the philosophic schools naturally an attempt was made to get
a more far-reaching view of the universe, and here the notion was
elaborated of the process of things being a cyclic movement, in
which history repeated itself over and over again without any end."
..." Decline within each period and the periods endlessly repeat-
ing themselves in an unvarying round." The whole chapter should
be read.

2 The actual phrase " the kingdom of God " or " the kingdom of
heaven," as something to be established in the future, does not
appear to occur earlier than the Gospels (see Foakes Jackson and
Lake's Beginnings of Christianity, vol. i. pp. 269-70). But the idea
is constant in the prophets and the phrase also, or something like
it, in the sense of the divine sovereignty, e.g. Ps. cxlv 12-13.

3 Is. ii 2-4, Micah iv 1-3.

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF ISRAEL 15

the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above
the hills ; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many
peoples shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to
the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of
Jacob ; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will
walk in his paths ; for out of Zion shall go forth the
law (or ' instruction '), and the word of the Lord from
Jerusalem. And he shall judge between the nations,
and shall reprove many peoples ; and they shall beat
their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into
pruning-hooks : nation shall not lift up sword against
nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

This great vision, and many like it, will be found to
involve certain distinguishable elements.

(1) The idea of the spiritual sovereignty and uni-
versality of the religion of Israel so that all nations
must seek the word of the Lord from Israel as its com-
missioned dispenser. This idea finds vivid expression
again and again in passages which are amongst the
loftiest in the Old Testament, as when Isaiah sees
Egypt and Assyria linked with one another in one re-
ligion through Israel as its medium 1 ; or the Second
Isaiah sees faithful Israel, now purified, reinstated,
and reunited, set "for a covenant of the people,
for a light of the Gentiles " 2 ; or Zechariah sees
" ten men, out of all the languages of the nations,
taking hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying,
We will go with you, for we have heard that God is
with you " 3 ; or Malachi discerns a catholic church
as already in being " from the rising of the sun
even unto the going down of the same my name
great among the heathen ; and in every place incense
offered unto my name, and a pure offering " 4 ; or
a late prophet sees Jerusalem as the scene of a
divine banquet for all nations " of fat things full
of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined," and of

1 Is. xix 23-5. 2 Ig. xiij 6.

3 Zech. viii 23. * Malachi i 11.

16 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

a radiant life of knowledge, immortality and joy l ;
or finally where the Psalmist sees the men of all
nations calling Zion their mother. 2 It is a fall
from this high level when the final vindication
of Israel appears as merely their victory over the
heathen.

(2) But, secondly, this glorious vision is only
possible if all the horrible tyrannies, the monstrous
fabrics of pride, insolence, cruelty and lust, which
vex the groaning earth, have been crushed and
annihilated, either by the manifest hand of God
working through whatever external agency He may
choose, or by the strengthening of Israel and its
king. Thus a great part of the writings of the
prophets is occupied with the " dooms " upon
Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Tyre, and the rest. But
so corrupt and false to its trust is Israel itself,
God's chosen instrument, that it too must fall under
scathing judgment, only never, like the other world
powers, 3 to the point of its utter destruction. Israel
suffers only thereby to be purged, and, though it
be but as a faithful remnant, to pursue its course.
People sometimes ask what element of inspiration
there is in the Book of Esther, and why it is in the
Canon. I should be disposed to answer that nowhere
is the sense of the indestructibility of Israel, even
under circumstances of extremest peril, coupled with
the responsibility of all individual Israelites for the
maintenance of their faith and loyalty, expressed
more vividly than in the words of Mordecai to Esther,
the Jewish wife of a Persian king " Think not with
thyself that thou shalt escape in the king's house,
more than all the Jews. For if thou altogether

1 Is. xxv 6-8.

* Ps. Ixxxvii 5. So the Greek Bible rendered it : " Zion is our
mother."

3 Only in Jeremiah is the idea of a restoration appended also
to the dooms upon the nations, or some of them : see Jer. xlvi 26,
xlviii 47, xlix 6, 39. But see also xxx 11.

THE MESSIANIC KINGDOM 17

boldest thy peace at this time, then shall relief and
deliverance arise to the Jews from another place ;
but thou and thy father's house shall perish ; and who
knoweth whether thou art not come to the kingdom
for such a time as this ? " *

(3) In the prophecies which secured the strongest
hold on the imagination of the people, the divine
instrument of the sovereignty of Israel is to be
an anointed king of the house of David, " the
Christ " (anointed one) as he alone came in later
days to be called. This became the national hope
the raising up by the hand of God of the righteous
king of David's line, who is to administer the divine
righteousness on earth with a resistless power and
finally in perfect peace to whom God stands so
close that he is to be called His Son 2 and to bear
His name upon him, " Immanuel, God with us,"
" Mighty God, Everlasting Father." 3

The prophets generally see the glorious Messianic
day looming in the immediate future just behind their
present troubles and sufferings, 4 just as they see the
purging judgment over the whole world behind each
particular judgment on each nation which sets itself in
turn against God and His people. 5 These immediate
expectations are never realized. Nevertheless, their
failure does not destroy the confident expectation.
As God is God, so at last it must be. Even when the

1 Esther iv 13-14 S 2 Ps. ii 7 and (?) 12, Ixxxix 26-7.

8 Is. vii 14, ix 6. The Jews seem never to have interpreted
these names as meaning that the King was himself to be God.
It was the name of God that was to be upon him ; cf. Micah v 4.
We must always distinguish the original sense of the prophecies
from that which the Christian teachers saw in them. But it is, of
course, quite credible that the sense later assigned to them may
have lain in the intention of the inspiring Spirit. In some cases
I should find it difficult to doubt this.

4 See especially Is. vii 10-17 and Micah v 5 ; cf. the expectation
concerning Zerubbabel in Haggai, and the expectation of Jewish
sovereignty in Daniel immediately after the downfall of Antiochus
Epiphanes.

5 See later, pp. 139ff.

LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE

18 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

figure of the sovereign king of David's line is absent,
the vision of the kingdom remains. And before our
Lord's time, though the hope of the world- sovereignty
of Israel never looked so remote as under Roman
supremacy, the figure of the victorious king of David's
line is again brought into prominence. In the
" Psalms of Solomon " a Pharisaic work of some
fifty years before *our Lord's day the expected
kingdom has again its centre in the wonderful and
all-powerful king, who is there first apparently called
" the Lord Christ." *

(4) The vision of the days of the Messiah, or of
the good time to come, which formed so large a part
of the prophetic message, vague as it remained in
its details, had some other definite features which
must be noted as forming part of the Jewish back-
ground of the New Testament. Israel, restored,
converted and supreme, is to be granted by God
a new and everlasting Covenant which shall renew
the old covenant made with David and augment its
spiritual richness. 2 It is to be accompanied by an
outpouring of the divine Spirit " upon all flesh," 3 and
by a resurrection of righteous Israelites, who have
died before the dawning of the great day, to partici-
pate in its blessings. 4 We cannot understand the
New Testament unless we remember that the coming
of the glorious kingdom, or reign of God and His
Anointed, was to be accompanied by the inauguration

1 Ps. Sol. xvii 36 : " They are all holy and their king is Christ
the Lord " (Xpio-rbs Kvpios), or it may be translated " an anointed
Lord." But in Lam. iv 20 the Hebrew text " The Lord's anointed "
appears in the Greek Bible as Xpurrbs Kvpios.

2 Jer. xxxii 40, 1 5, Ezech. xvi 60, Is. Iv 3, lix 21.

8 See Ezech. xi 19, xxxvi 24 ff., xxxvii 14, xxxix 29, Is.
xxxii 15, xliv 3, lix 21, Zech. xii 10, Joel ii 28-29. The centre
of this effusion of the Holy Spirit of God is the Messiah himself
(Is. xi 1, 2), or "the Servant of Jehovah " (xlii 1, Ixi 1). But
the Messiah does not appear in O.T. prophecy as himself destined
to give the Spirit to his new people.

4 Is. xxvi 19, Dan. xii 2. (Here also is the resurrection of the
unfaithful to shame and contempt.)

THE " ONE LIKE A SOX OF MAX " 19

of a New Covenant, the effusion of the divine Spirit,
and the Resurrection of the Dead. 1

(5) This was the hope of Israel, vague in detail,
but fairly definite in general outline, which we find
in possession as soon as we approach the Gospels,
in its more spiritual form in the hopes of the humble
and pious folk among whom our Lord was born,
and in a fiercer secular form in the zealous nationalism
of the popular heart. How Jesus both accepted and
transmuted this hope it will be in part our business
to consider.

But there is one feature of this hope, to which
we shall have to give more detailed consideration
when we come to speak of the much discussed sub-
ject of our Lord's apocalyptic teaching, 2 but which
we must not omit now. We shall find our Lord
speaking of Himself as " the Son of Man " who is
to come at the last on the clouds of heaven, with
the holy angels, in great power and glory, to judge
the world and gather together His elect. 3 Now
there is one only passage in the Old Testament
a passage which had clearly been given great import-
ance to which this language refers. It is the vision
of Daniel. 4

And behold there came with the clouds of heaven
one like unto a son of man, and he came even to the
Ancient of Days, and they brought him near before him.
And there was given him dominion and glory and a
kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should
serve him : his dominion is an everlasting dominion
which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which
shall not be destroyed.

1 I say nothing here of the figure of the Servant of Jehovah, who
redeems Israel by the sacrifice of his life, in Is. lii, liii, which seems
to have taken no hold on the imagination of Israel before our Lord's
time.

a Cap. V. p. 137.

3 See Mark xiii 26-27 and xiv 62.

4 Dan. vii. 1S-27.

20 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

In this vision the being in the form of a son of man
stands not for the Christ but for the people of
Israel the " people of the saints of the most high,"
just as the four animal forms who come out of the
sea l represent the empires of Babylon, Media, Persia
and Greece. They are all merely symbolic figures.
What the writer is contemplating under these figures
is the establishment; in the place of the Empire of
the Seleucid successors of Alexander the Great, now
represented by the persecutor Antiochus Epiphanes,
of the people of Israel in triumph upon the earth.
It is the old Messianic hope without mention of the
Messiah.

In the past it was thought that our Lord was
simply referring back to this vision, interpreting the
figure like to a son of man of the Christ, instead of
the whole people of Israel ; just as He interpreted
the Suffering Servant of Jehovah as the Christ,
whereas originally he had stood for the whole people,
or the whole of the faithful remnant. But recent
study has brought into much prominence the later
Jewish Apocalypses, and amongst them, most con-
spicuously, the Book of Enoch and the part of that
composite book which is called the Similitudes,
which is held to date from the first century before
Christ. And in these Similitudes a unique represen-
tation is found. The imagery of the Book of Daniel
is revived in a new sense. A celestial being, called
the Elect One, in the form of a son of man, and
called also "the Son of Man," 2 who has existed in
heaven from the beginning, is summoned forth by
" the Lord of Spirits " (that is the name of God in
these Similitudes) to sit upon His throne and execute
His judgment upon the sinful world. He is twice

1 Verse 3.

2 The passages, however, which call him the Elect One and those
which call him the Son of Man are held by the experts to have
belonged originally to different documents.

THE APOCALYPSES 21

called " the Anointed," * but otherwise suggests in
no respect the Christ of Jewish tradition, the anointed
King of David's line. He is a heavenly being,
neither God nor properly man, but man-like. But
the language used by our Lord about the coming of
the Son of Man in judgment so much more closely
represents the idea of these Similitudes than the
idea of Daniel that it is difficult to doubt that our
Lord had it in mind. We remember that the Epistle
of Jude, one of " the brethren of the Lord," is full
of reminiscences of the Book of Enoch, and there
is no reason why our Lord should not have been
acquainted with it. 2 Only if so, as we shall see, He
sets its imagery on a wholly new background in
applying it to Himself.

We shall have to return to this subject when we
are examining our Lord's language. But it is neces-
sary, in describing the Jewish hope, to say something
about these Jewish Apocalypses which have lately
been engaging so much attention. 3

1 In c. xlviii 10 and lii 4. But see Beginnings of Christianity,
p. 371. Note also that in Ixxi 14, as it stands, Enoch himself is
said to be constituted the Son of Man. Dr. Charles, however,
would alter the text. On the very ambiguous nature of the
document see appended note, p. 30.

2 I am assuming what I see no good reason to doubt, that the
author of the Epistle of Jude was really one of our Lord's family,
probably a half-brother.

3 For a general account of the Apocalyptic literature we may
go to Dr. Charles, Between the Old and New Testaments (Williams
& Norgate, " Home University Library "), or to Lagrange, op. cit.,
or to Drs. Foakes Jackson and Lake, op. cit., pp. 126 following.

Dr. Charles is an expert and, like most experts, is over-enthu-
siastic on his special subject and, I think, greatly exaggerates
its importance. And an American writer, Dr. Simkhovitch, not
a theologian by profession but an economist, who has published
an exceedingly interesting essay, Towards the Understanding of
Jesus (Macmillan, New York, 1921), expresses feelings about these
apocalypses which many of us will be found to share : "In the
apocalyptic and eschatological literature of the time the world
was to come to an end. But what really did come to an end in
that literature was the last shred of thinking capacity and common
sense." He would perhaps admit that 2 Esdras is a partial
exception.

3

22 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

This not very attractive type of literature was
quite unknown to our learned men of old, except
in the case of the Apocalypse of Ezra, which we
find in our " Apocrypha " as the Second Book of
Esdras. These apocalypses belong to the centuries
immediately before or after the birth of our Lord.
They were soon discarded by Jews and Christians
alike, but found favour for a time in some quarters,
and many of them survive in translations into many
languages, indicating their former popularity. They
are written as in the persons of ancient seers Adam,
Enoch, Noah, the sons of Jacob, Moses, Ezra
recording visions of the mysteries of nature and
creation, and of the angels and of the future destinies
of the world, the day of judgment, and heaven and
hell. 1 And one of their chief characteristics may be
said to be that, instead of this world being the scene
of the kingdom of God (as in the Old Testament),
this world is represented, at least in many of them,
as wholly passing away and another world, the world
of heaven and hell, as taking its place.

In the prophets and psalms we have a great deal
of language about nature, which represents it as
violently moved in sympathy with God's acts of
judgment and mercy, and in terror at His coming.
" The hills melted like wax at the presence of the
Lord.'* " All the host of heaven shall be dissolved
and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll."
" The sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and
the moon shall not cause her light to shine." " The
mountains and the hills shall break forth before you
into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap
their hands." We shall have to come back upon this
sort of language, where we find the like to it being

1 They seem, in their speculative interest in the mysteries of
nature and the unseen world, and their elaborate doctrine of angels
and in their " other world " hopes, to exhibit an influence alien
to Israel. We may perhaps find in Persia the source of this
influence.

THE BOOK OF ENOCH 23

used by our Lord and His disciples. It is difficult
to say how far it is consciously metaphorical. Cer-
tainly in the later days of prophecy the prophets
contemplated a physical catastrophe on the vastest
scale accompanying the divine judgments on the
world and the ushering in of the divine kingdom.
The old heaven and the old earth yield to a new
heaven and a new earth. But the new heaven and
the new earth always, on examination, appear to
be the old heaven and the old earth purified and
renewed, with Jerusalem still at the centre and the
nations of the world doing her homage. 1

But this was not the case in the later Apocalypses.
There, says Dr. Harnack, 2 " the expectations for the
future become more and more transcendent ; they
are shifted increasingly to the realm of the super-
natural and the supramundane ; something quite
new comes down from heaven to earth, and the new
course on which the world enters severs it from the
old ; nay this earth, transfigured as it will be, is no
longer the final goal ; the idea of an absolute bliss
arises whose abode can only be heaven itself." So
also Dr. Charles writes : " The hope of an eternal
Messianic kingdom on the present earth, which had
been taught by the Old Testament prophets and
cherished by every Israelite, was then abandoned.
The earth had come to be regarded as wholly unfit
for the manifestation of the kingdom." 3

I cannot but think that in recent literature the
importance of these Apocalypses has been immensely

1 See Is. xxiv 23 (apparently a late prophecy incorporated in
Isaiah), and Is. Ixvi 19-24 and Joel ii 32, hi 16. So it is, as we
shall see, in the New Testament.

What is Christianity ? (Eng. Trans., Williams & Norgate), p. 137.

3 Between the Old World and the New, p. 119. If Dr. Charles
means by " then," at the date c. 100 B.C., when the new style of
apocalypse begins, then the statement is not, I think, true. The
old hope survived in full operation into N.T. times see The Psalm *
of Solomon and the N.T. But it is true within a certain range of
feeling or thought represented in these apocalypses.

J4 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

exaggerated . For example, we are constantly told
that the established belief of the Jews and of the
Pharisees in particular, and therefore of St. Paul
in his Pharisaic days, included the belief in a Messiah
pre-existing in the heavens, after the manner of the
" elect one " of the Book of Enoch. This I believe
to be so exaggerated an estimate as to be positively
untrue, and I have -dealt with this at some length
in a note appended to this chapter. What I would
seek to do here is to point out that the heavenly
being of Enoch, though he may be called the anointed
one, is a substitute for the Christ of Jewish tradition
and quite different in idea. When the Jewish idea
of a Messianic kingdom of perfection in this world
was abandoned by the apocalyptic writers in favour
of another world wholly different from this, the
tradition of the Messianic kingdom to come became
an awkward encumbrance which could not be fitted
into their scheme. They either left it out altogether
(like the author of our Similitudes of Enoch) and let
the day of judgment and the other world succeed at
once to the confusions of this world, or they inter-
posed the Messianic kingdom, with or without the
personal Messiah, as a temporary preparation for,
or foretaste of, the real heaven to come, 1 to be
succeeded in its turn by conflict and confusion.
From their point of view the Messiah and his kingdom
upon earth were not wanted. What they wanted
was the other world. And the so-called Messiah of
the Book of Enoch, who is the divine instrument of
judgment and the harbinger of the world to come, is a
substitute for the human king of the family of David
who was to inaugurate the kingdom of God in this
world. The two ideas belong to different orders of
thought. Now, no doubt, the Messianic hope when

1 This is the first form of the idea of the millennium, which we
imd in the Revelation of St. J ohn.

THE OLD MESSIANIC HOPE 25

our Lord came into the world was full of confusions.
Nevertheless nothing is more certain than that what
was in possession, and remained in possession, was
the old orthodox Jewish tradition of a king of David's
line who was to restore the kingdom to Israel and to
make Israel the centre of a world-wide kingdom of
God. How our Lord dealt with this expectation,
and what use He made of the apocalyptic idea on a
new basis, we shall see in due course. But all the
evidence shows that the old Jewish tradition, as it
appears in the " Psalms of Solomon," and not the
apocalyptic vision, possessed the ground in the New
Testament times. This is the Messianic hope of the
circle of humble, pious folk among whom our Lord
was born. This is the basis of the preaching of
John the Baptist, as it is represented in the Gospels,
who expects and finds the Christ as a man among
men on earth. All the anxious questioning of the
Jews expressed in the Gospels concerning the origin
of the Christ, and what is to be expected of Him, is
on the same basis. God was " to restore again the
kingdom to Israel " through an anointed king of
David's line. Like the influence of the Essenes,
which hardly appears in the New Testament, so the
influence of the apocalypses doubtless existed in a
certain circle a circle, we suspect, from which our
Lord was not wholly alien but it was by no means
dominant or common. This the evidence seems to
indicate quite unmistakably. 1

On this basis I may quite briefly indicate the stand-
points of the different parties among the Jews with
whose names the Gospels make us familiar the
Sadducees, the Herodians, the Pharisees ; and I must

1 See Matt, ii 4-6, Luke i 32-3, 54-5, 76-9, ii 11, 26, 34, 38.
For the preaching of John the Baptist see p. 45. For later indi-
cations see Matt, xii 23, xxii 41 ff., xxiv 5, 24, xxvii 42, Mark
x 47, xi 10, Luke iv 41 ff., ix 20, Acts i 6 ; cf. John i 41,
45-9, iv 25, vi 15, vii 41-2.

26 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

add, though the name is only once mentioned, the
Zealots. 1

The Sadducees are most favourably represented
in the Book of Ecclesiasticus, which appears to belong
to their tradition. In the New Testament their
chief representatives are the high priestly family of
Annas, a thoroughly worldly group, occupied with
the interests of their position, and determined, above
all things, to keep on good terms with Rome, so as
to retain whatever relative independence and govern-
ing authority were still allowed to them. They
probably were totally without the Messianic expecta-
tion, and, indeed, it is not anywhere suggested in
Ecclesiasticus.

The Herodians were no doubt equally alien to it.
They were the adherents of a semi-Jewish dynasty
whose consistent policy had been, while maintaining
the Jewish religion, at least in form, and giving it a
magnificent shrine in the new temple at Jerusalem,
to favour the absorption of Israel in the general
world of the Roman Empire. 2

But the Pharisees, as Josephus says, " had the
multitude on their side." They were the real leaders
of religion. Not that they were advocates of armed
resistance to Rome. They saw the hopelessness of
this, and in fact they had apparently joined in the
petition, offered to Augustus soon after our Lord's
birth, that Judaea might be made a Roman province.
They anticipated, no doubt, less interference with
true religion under a religiously indifferent Roman

1 The point of view of these parties, in relation to our Lord's
teaching, is admirably characterized in Professor Vladimir
Simkhovitch's Towards the Understanding of Jesus (Macmillan,
New York, 1921) a most interesting study; also in Stephen
Liberty's Political Relations of Christ's Ministry (Milford, 1916).

That one of the apostles is called the Zealot indicates, what other
evidence indicates, that the party was already in existence, as
assuredly its spirit was. Of the Essenes, as they do not cross our
path in the N.T., I say nothing.

3 Simkhovitch, op. tit. pp. 15-17.

POPULAR NATIONALISM 27

governor than under an Herodian prince bent on
secularizing Judaism. But they held passionately to
the hope of the Messiah. We probably interpret
them best if we represent them as believing that the
chosen people, by the strict observance of the law
and the tradition of the elders, would merit and
obtain such favour of God as that He would bare
His arm and work the great redemption by His own
omnipotence.

But this acquiescence in foreign sovereignty did
not satisfy the people as a whole. Since the days
of the Maccabean revolt, under the Greek and the
Roman yoke alike, Judaea seethed with nationalism,
and the Zealots were the extremists in this move-
ment. For them the hope of the Messiah meant the
hope of a king who would lead them in revolt against
the Roman supremacy, and, by the power of God
assisting him, do as the Maccabees had done of old,
only on a very much grander scale that is, win
liberty for Israel, and even world sovereignty. It is
impossible to read the pages of the Jewish historian
Josephus, without seeing what a seething mass of
nationalism Judaea was in our Lord's lifetime, and
how the Messianic hope presented itself to the heart
of the people. 1

I hope enough has been said to enable any reader
who has an ordinary acquaintance with the Old
Testament to realize the extreme importance of
beginning the study of Christ on the background

1 See Simkhovitch, op. cit., pp. 27 f . : " The religion of their fore-
fathers became [to the Jewish people at large] the unfurled banner
of a nation at bay. . . . From now on, whether in passive resist-
ance or in open rebellion, the only Lord and Master they recognised
was the Lord of Hosts . . . with whom they were in covenant,
and who must send the great Deliverer to save His people in their
hour of need." Cf. p. 30 and p. 48 : " The loud nationalist call
to rebellion, the fervid hope for a Messiah, God's anointed leader
and the redeemer of Israel, stirred the deepest emotions."

28 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

of the traditional Jewish faith and hope. This
is equally important for what it excludes that is,
the possibility of our Lord's first disciples " deifying "
their honoured Master in the way Greeks would have
done, because their minds were full of the " jealousy "
of the One God the Creator ; and for what it in-
volves that is the eager expectation of divine re-
demption, which, at the period when Jesus was born,
was especially acute and which ran upon the tradi-
tional lines of the prophetic forecast of the Messiah
and his kingdom on earth.

NOTE A
Traces of Polytheism in the Old Testament

As is well known, the common Hebrew word for
God is a plural " elohim." But this is interpreted by
A. B. Davidson (The Theol. of the O.T., p. 100) and
Driver (Genesis, pp. 402 ff.) as a plural of majesty rather
than as a relic of polytheism. Nevertheless, we find
phrases in the O.T. which suggest that there were other
Gods besides Jehovah phrases which would not have
been used in the later days of Israel : and the same
must be said of the use of elohim for judges and rulers
(Psalm Ixxxii 6), or for the dead (1 Sam. xxviii 13),
or perhaps for angels (Psalm viii 5). Such uses are
probably derived from a tradition older than strict
monotheism. But all this laxer use of the title God
had been rendered impossible by the teaching of the
Prophets. Only One could be called God or worshipped.

Of course the use of Psalm Ixxxii ("I have said ye
are Gods ") ascribed to Jesus in John x 34 is interesting.
It might suggest that our Lord wished to encourage
something like the extended Hellenic use of the term
God. But a single phrase in a single Gospel must not be
interpreted so as to be quite out of harmony with the
general teaching of our Lord. This particular passage
is, I think, one of those in which (granted its genuineness)
our Lord asks questions solely to force men to think out
their own meaning without conveying any positive

THE TEACHING OF ZOROASTER 21>

teaching at all. He means " How can you object to
my calling myself the Son of God, when you yourselves
are bound to recognize that in the Psalms judges are
even called Gods in some sense ? There is here plainly
some sort of communication of divine authority to men
such as you should recognize also in me." I shall have
occasion later (pp. 186 f.) to point out that it was part of
the method of our Lord to test men's sincerity and
consistency by questions which cannot be taken as
suggesting any positive teaching on His part, e.g. Mark
x 18 and xii 35-37.

NOTE B
The Idea of Divine Purpose in the Teaching of Zoroaster

Quite independently of Israel, the Persian or Iranian
race, under the prophetic guidance of Zoroaster, whose
date is quite uncertain but w r ho was assuredly a real
man and a great prophetic soul, was taught to see this
world as the scene of a divine purpose one day to triumph.
Whether Zoroaster was an ultimate dualist appears to
be uncertain. But certainly he saw this world, and the
larger universe, as the scene of a conflict between a good
spirit and a bad. But the good spirit is to triumph.
" Deliverers " or " saviours " are sent to help forward
his victory. And the call to all men is to exercise their
free will by co-operating with the good god and His
instruments, and so " make the world advance." The
end " the last turning of the creation in its course "
is certain. The scene of history is to close in a day of
judgment, beyond which is a perpetual heaven for the
righteous (" the best mental state "), a perpetual hell
("the worst life") for "the liars" or those w r ho have
followed the false spirit, and perhaps a middle region
for " those whose false things and good things balance."
This primitive ethical gospel of Zoroaster became much
overlaid and buried in rubbish ; and thus it contrasts
with the Jewish faith in having been on the whole in-
effectual over any wide area : see Dr. Sydney Cave's
Introd. to the Study of some Living Religions of the East
(Duckworth, 1921 a very useful study), pp. 64 ff. ;

BO THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

<?f. Hoffding's Philosophy of Religion (Eng. trans.,
Macmillan, 1906), p. 53, and Bevan's Hellenism and
Christianity, p. 187, where, however, the statement that
Zoroaster looked for one Saviour in the fulness of time
to destroy evil does not seem to be borne out by the
earliest authorities. It is certainly not to be found in
the deeply interesting Gathas (Sacred Books of the East,
vol. xxxi.).

In the recent work of Eduard Meyer, Ursprang und
Anfdnge des Christenthum-s, vol. ii., a very important place
is assigned to Persian beliefs the beliefs emanating from
Zoroaster in influencing the later religion of Israel.
In particular the whole idea of the " world to come "
as a world quite different from the present world a
world of heaven and hell which begins when this world has
vanished such as appears in many of the later Jewish
Apocalypses, is supposed to be due to Persian influ-
ences, and also the developed angelology and doctrine of
Satan.

NOTE C

The Belief in the Pre-existing Son of Man

It is the fashion to-day to speak as if the Jews, and
especially the Pharisees, of our Lord's day believed in
the Messiah as the Son of Man, already existing in the
heaven from the beginning of time and destined to be
manifested in God's good time. So Dr. Rashdall l (quoting
Weiss) : " Wrede and Briichner have conclusively shown
that Paul before his conversion held the belief, as a
Pharisee, that the Messiah existed from all eternity with
>God in heaven." Thus, "as an apostle of Christ, he
thought of Jesus as the Messiah and therefore ... a
heavenly being who existed with the Father before His
manifestation on earth." So Dr. Stanton 2 : The pre-
cxistence of Jesus " was inevitably suggested by the
adentification of Jesus with the heavenly Son of Man."
So also Dr. Harris, Creeds or No Creeds (Murray,
1922) : " It is one of the most assured results of recent

1 Idea oj Atommoti, pp. 127-9.

a The Gospels as Historical Documents, vol. iii.

THE PRE-EXISTENT SON OF MAN 31

Synoptic criticism (liberal as well as orthodox) that the
title Son of Man implies pre-existence, and that not
merely impersonal or ideal pre-existence, but actual and
personal pre-existence in a state of divine glory and
majesty with the Father in heaven " (see pp. 220, 264,
367). But we must confront these scholars with Dal-
nian, 1 than whom, I suppose, there is no greater authority
on Jewish matters : " Judaism has never known any-
thing of a pre-existence peculiar to the Messiah, ante-
cedent to his birth as a human being" " The dominance
of the idea in any Jewish circle whatever cannot seriously
be upheld." " The common opinion that Paul simply
adopted his designation of Christ as 4 the last Adam ' and
* the second man 'from the Rabbinic theology is erroneous,
for their theology knew nothing of such a comparison
between Adam and the Messiah." Nor did it know any-
thing of a pre-existent ideal man. Dalman seems to me
to prove his case.

(1) In documents which can reasonably be held to be
pre-Christian there is nothing to suggest a pre-existing
Son of Man or pre-existing Messiah except the Similitudes
of Enoch, of which we are just going to speak, and in
post-Christian Judaism only the " Ezra Apocalypse "
(see 2 Esdras vii 28, xii 32, xiii 26-52, xiv 9), 2 and
nothing else till we come to a seventh- or eighth-century
document, and later to mediaeval mysticism. The only
pre-Christian ground of the idea, then, appears to be
the Similitudes of Enoch.

(2) But we must be very careful in quoting this docu-
ment. What we have to do with is a translation in
Ethiopic from a Greek translation of the original. Our
existing version is confessedly greatly interpolated.
Moreover, it has passed through Christian hands.
Again, the critics rightly discern, underlying our existing
Ethiopic text, two documents, from which the relevant
passages are quoted one of which (A) speaks of a
celestial figure which is called " the Elect One," and
another different document (B) which speaks of " another

1 Words of Jesus, pp. 128-32, 248, 252.

8 See Dr. Box's Tlie Ezra Apocalypse (Pitman, 1912). The date
of the whole book is c. A.D. 120. Some of the passages referred to
belong to an older document, c. A.D. 90.

32 THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

being whose countenance had the appearance of a man,"
and who is afterwards called " that Son of Man " or
" the Son of Man." l Both documents appear to have
assigned to the celestial figure the same functions, though
pre-existence is only asserted of " the Son of Man." 2
Now it seems to be probable that the document (A) is
original and the document (B) interpolated either by a
Jew who sought to divert the title Son of Man, derived
from the Book of Daniel, from the Christian human-born
Christ, or (less probably) by a Christian from a somewhat
different motive. See Lagrange Le Messianfeme chez
les Juifs (Paris : Lecoffre, 1909) a careful and ex-
haustive examination. On the general idea of pre-
existence see pp. 43 ff. ; on the Similitudes, pp. 87 f.

Further, we must notice that the Similitudes as they
stand give a confused impression. The " Son of Man,"
or Elect One, is a celestial quasi-angelic being who is
properly neither God nor man and is never destined for
human birth and life. He is rather a substitute for the
Messiah than the Messiah (see Beginnings of Christi-
anity, by Foakes Jackson and Kirsopp Lake, p. 371).
But in one passage (Ixxi 14), which is supported by
another interpolated passage (Ix 10) and by the " Book
of the Secrets of Enoch" (see Lagrange, p. 97) Enoch him-
self is represented as that Son of Man. (See Beginnings,
p. 371. Dr. Charles would alter the text.)

(3) Dr. Charles' theory that the wicked * Kings ' and
' mighty men ' of the Similitudes, whom the Elect is to
overthrow, are the later Maccabean princes is surely con-
tradicted by the plain statement that they are idolaters.
" Their faith is in the gods which they have made with
their hands " (xlvi 7). His suggested parallels from the
Psalms of Solomon are not parallels. There the
Maccabean rulers are described as w r orse than the heathen
(Ps. Sol. i 8, viii 14, xvii 16) but not as idolaters. The
fact that in the Similitudes the adversaries are described
as heathen seems to leave us without any certain evidence
of date except what is found in the traces of the
Similitudes in the Gospels.

1 See Charles, Book of Enoch, pp. 64-5

2 Charles, op. cit. p. 65.

THE PRE-EXISTENT SON OF MAN 33

(4) All, then, that I think it is at all safe to assume
is that the pre-Christian author of the Similitudes of the
Book of Enoch borrowed from Daniel the idea of a
celestial figure " like unto a Son of Man " regarded it
as an individual and not a mere image of the sacred
nation called the individual " the elect one," and
represented him (still with Daniel) as coming on the
clouds of heaven to " the Lord of Spirits " (as he calls
God) and being appointed by God to sit on His throne
and judge the world and usher in the world to come.
This celestial being was, of course, conceived as pre-
existing, and the idea would have been known to what-
ever circle of persons was familiar with the Similitudes.
But the circle does not appear to have been a large one.
As I have shown, it was the old-fashioned idea of the
Messiah, who was to be the Son of David and to restore
the kingdom to Israel on earth, which is assumed to
prevail in the Gospels and early chapters of Acts, and
none other. And it is (I think) quite certain that in
our Lord's day " the Son of Man " was not recognized
(before He adopted the name) as a title of the Messiah.
Also there does not appear to be in the New Testament
any recognition whatever of a pre-existing Man or
celestial being in human form (see below, pp.76n. 2, 87 f.,
115, 313).

CHAPTER II

THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

UPON the basis of the Jew's belief in God, and his
vivid, though confused, expectation of His coming
and His kingdom, our task lies now with a certain
group of Jews, the first disciples of Jesus. We
have to examine the gradual growth of their faith
in their Master, first as the promised Messiah, then
as the Lord of all, then as the incarnate Son of God ;
and our object will be to enquire whether this faith,
as it reaches expression in St. Paul and the Epistle
to the Hebrews and St. John, was in such sense
inevitable, or required by the facts of the case, as
that it can be pronounced the only legitimate inter-
pretation of the person of Jesus, valid for us to-day
as for them of old.

This is a profoundly interesting study of the growth
of a conviction in a gradually expanding group :
but it is also a difficult study because every step of
our progress will be over ground which has been
the subject of acute controversy controversy which
is still as far as possible from any general settlement
in the world of Biblical criticism ; and my readers
must be patient with me if I proceed very carefully.

As has been explained l in the volume which pre-
ceded this, the mass of the critical work which has

1 Belief in God, pp. 215ff.
34

PROF. HARNACK 35

been poured from the European press, and the most
famous of the attempted reconstructions of " the
Jesus of history," have been produced upon the
basis of an assumption that the miraculous and
generally the supernatural that is the coming of
God into the world of man and nature in a new
sense with a directly redemptive purpose, ac-
companied with special acts calculated to mark
that purpose cannot really have occurred, or, at
any rate, is not rationally credible. As has been
shown, to start from such an intellectual assumption
involves very violent treatment of our documents,
the Gospels, which are full of the miraculous and
of the faith in a special activity of God for the re-
demption of mankind. Thus it leaves the fabric
of the evangelical narrative in so shattered and pre-
carious a condition (as anyone can see for himself)
that each critic who aims at reconstruction can
select and reject amongst the materials that remain
almost at will. This is what accounts for the
amazing differences in the resultant " Jesus of
History " which is offered us by different schools
of critics.

(1) To-day there are three such schools which
excite the most interest. There is first the Liberal
Protestant School, of which Professor Harnack may
be taken as the outstanding representative. In his
famous lectures on "The Essence of Christianity" 1
Jesus appears as a simple and gracious figure indeed,
preaching an ethical gospel, inspired by the con-
viction of the Fatherhood of God, the infinite and
equal worth of every human soul, the duty and joy
of self-sacrifice and brotherliness, and the inward-
ness of true religion or the kingdom of God. " In
the combination of these ideas God the Father,
providence, the position of men as God's children,

1 In the English translation, What is Christianity ? (Williams
and Norgate) ; in the original, Das Wesen des Christenthums.

36 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

the infinite value of the human soul the whole
gospel is expressed." 1 The work of the gracious
teacher was accompanied by a marvellous power of
healing (" by suggestion " as we should now say),
which is represented in an exaggerated form in the
Gospels as they stand, mixed with nature miracles
which, of course, it is taken for granted cannot
really have occurred. 2 But the " miracles," of
whatever sort they were, and the claim of Jesus to
be the Christ (which in some sense is admitted),
with everything that would involve superhuman
quality in Him, are passed over by Harnack very
lightly. His ethical teaching and influence was
the thing that mattered. The subsequent belief
of the disciples in His corporal resurrection from
the dead, and their expectation of His coming in
glory, and the later introduction of a doctrine of
Incarnation, with a metaphysic of Christ's person
and of the Trinity in God, and the theory of a visible
church with sacraments and priesthood all these
elements of Christianity are treated as regrettable
necessities, due in part to the pressure first of the
Jewish and then of the Hellenic environment, and
in part to the exigences of an elementary organiza-
tion struggling to maintain itself. They were the
husk necessary for the time to the preservation of
the kernel. They are for the most part quite alien
to the spirit and intention of Jesus, and their sole
justification lies in the extent to which they enabled
the one thing necessary the essential ethical spirit
of Jesus to maintain itself and again and again to
be revived. But the Christ of Pauline and Johannine
theology, and even the Christ of the Acts, stands
already* at a great distance from the Jesus of
history.

1 Op. cit. p. 70 ; cf. p. 79: " The thought that he who loses his
life shall save it ... effects a transmutation of values."
a See pp. 27-31.

DR. SCHWEITZER 37

(2) In violent contrast to the Jesus of the Liberal
Protestant School, which has many representatives
in this country, stands the Jesus of the Apocalyptic
school represented by Schweitzer and Loisy, which
also has had great influence on not a few English
writers. 1

All the startling " apocalyptic " features of the
Gospels which Harnack sought to eliminate or
reduce in significance, are by these writers brought
to the front in their reconstruction of the original
history, and made to occupy almost the whole
ground. Jesus is represented as what we cannot
but call an enthusiastic fanatic, who believed him-
self to be destined to be manifested immediately
from heaven as the Christ or the Son of Man (of the
Book of Enoch) to judge the present world and in-
augurate the next world.

Schweitzer and his school make it a chief point
of their contention that " the Christ " of the Gospels
is not an earthly person, but one to be manifested
in glory from heaven, according to the picture in
the Similitudes of Enoch. Therefore our Lord on
earth was not the Christ, but only believed Himself
to be destined to become the Christ on the Day of
Judgment. Incidentally I would note 2 that this is
flatly contrary to the evidence of the Gospels. There,
whatever the Christ is afterwards to become, He is
represented as first of all an earthly person, born
of the seed of David.

When Jesus first sent out the Twelve, He expected

1 The best book by which to judge of Schweitzer's view is the
second part of his treatise on " The Lord's Supper " (Das Abend-
mahl). This second part has been translated as The Mystery of the
Kingdom of God ; The Secret of Jesus' Meseiahship and Passion,
by Walter Lowrie, and published in New York (Dodd, Mead & Co.,
1914). It is most illuminating. In his larger and later work,
published in English as The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Black,
1910), his theory is constantly referred to and assumed. But its
grounds are not continuously given as in the earlier book.

8 See below, p. 76 n. 1.

38 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

His coming as Christ to occur before their mission
to the cities of Israel was completed, that is within
a few weeks. 1 As a result of His disappointment
in this expectation, and by reflecting on the death
of John the Baptist and on the figure of the Servant
of Jehovah in Isaiah liii, He came to the conviction
that His own sacrificial death was necessary to
bring the day of Resurrection and the coming of
the Christ in glory, and so gave Himself to death.
He died upon the cross with the cry of desolation
on His lips, and left His disciples overwhelmed with
the consciousness of failure. But their reviving
faith, feeding upon " visions " of Jesus as risen and
glorified, built the fabric of the belief of the earliest
Church in the heavenly Christ immediately to appear
in glory, which again was gradually transmuted
into the Christ of later Christian belief. By this
apocalyptic school of interpreters Christ's ethical
teaching is even ludicrously minimized. He had,
according to them, no thought of founding or re-
founding a Church to live a new kind of ethical
life in this world. He was a man possessed with
one idea, the idea of the immediate end of the world
and of Himself as the instrument of the divine
judgment; and this idea rendered all this world and
its concerns a matter of little moment, as indeed
the life of the world was almost over. All that is to
be done is to repent and to detach oneself absolutely
from all worldly ties, so as to be free to be admitted
into the world to come which is immediately
imminent. 2

From this Jesus the Christ of the Church is indeed
very far removed. It was only in fact by His ceasing
to be remembered as historically He was, that He
could be serviceable for the generations to come.

1 This is based on Matt, x 23, on which see below, p. 152 n.

2 This is what is meant by describing Christ's moral teaching as
merely rt interims-ethik."

DRS. BOUSSET AND LAKE 30

(3) There is a third school, for so it must be ranked,
which is best represented by Bousset in Germany
and Kirsopp Lake in England. 1 In this school the
Jesus of history is a very dim figure indeed. Little
or no originality of preaching about God or human
life is ascribed to Him. He preached a "message
of the kingdom of God and the duty of fellowship
in righteousness and love and mercy and forgive-
ness," 2 a message also of obedience to God and the
pre-eminence of spiritual values, largely presented in
parables. He died a loyal martyr to his witness for
real righteousness against the selfish conservatism
and religiosity of the Pharisees, the worldly hostility
of the Sadducees, and the violent ideals of popular
leaders of nationalism. But all the supernatural
features of the Gospels, and almost all the apoca-
lyptic claim, is to be ascribed to the first Jerusalem
community of disciples, and not to Christ, 3

The account which Bousset gives of the belief of
this community is very similar to that given by
Schweitzer, but it is ascribed, as I say, to the com-
munity and not to Jesus. This is the first trans-
formation that by which the historical Jesus
becomes the apocalyptic Christ. The second trans-
formation is still more important. It occurred in
the Hellenistic churches such as Antioch, Tarsus
and Damascus. There the Pagan religious world
was largely occupied with " mystery cults " that
is religious societies, which worshipped hero-gods
Dionysus or Hermes or Serapis, or Cybele and Attis,
or Osiris and Isis by whose patronage they believed

1 The central work of this school is Kyrios Christos (a history of
the faith in Christ from the beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus),
by Wilhelm Bousset, Gottingen, 1921. The school is best repre-
sented in England by Dr. Kirsopp Lake, Landmarks of Early
Christianity, and the larger work, The Beginnings of Christianity,
in which he collaborates with Dr. Foakes Jackson.

1 Bousset, op. tit. p. 74.

3 P. 37 : " Hier nicht der historische Jesus spricht, Bondern die
Gemeinde, die ihren Glauben an den Menschensohn verkundet."

40 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

themselves to be about to be translated from the
miseries and bondage of material life and death
into immortality and bliss. These mystery religions,
about which I shall have more to say, were " sacra-
mental " that is to say, participation in the blessings
of the redemption offered by them was to be secured
by undergoing certain ceremonies of initiation and
subsequent fellowship in a community of initiated
persons, who held some secrets of mystical knowledge
not communicated to the outer world. And they
had emancipated themselves from their original
national or local boundaries, and become, as we
may say, world religions. In these mystery religions
the hero-God, who was the object of worship, was
called " Lord." In the Christian communities,
then, of the Hellenistic world Jesus also began to be
called " Lord " ; and this title, for the majority of
the Gentile converts, carried with it all the associa-
tions of their former cults. Even before St. Paul
came to the front in these Gentile churches, they
were already in part assimilated to these Pagan
societies. But it was St. Paul's genius which, on
a basis of the old Jewish monotheism and apoca-
lyptic beliefs, developed a doctrine of Jesus the Lord,
the author of individual and present salvation " in
Christ " or " in the Spirit," mediated by sacramental
actions and in a sacramental fellowship, for any
man of any race, whereby the old Jewish and the
new Hellenic ideas of religion were brought together
in one system ; and this was the basis on which
what we know as the theology and sacramental
system of the Catholic church was founded. Sub-
stantially the same principles later found similar
expression in the theology of the unknown thinker
whom the Church called St. John. This was the
second great transformation by which the Christ
of St. Paul and of " St. John," which is almost the
Christ of the Catholic Church, takes the place of

THE GOSPELS 41

the apocalyptic Christ, and becomes still further
removed from the Jesus of history.

The educated Englishman to-day who is inter-
ested in religion is fairly familiar with the Liberal
Protestant conception of Jesus, and with the con-
ception of the Apocalyptic school. But the theory
of the school of Bousset is still strange to him.
However we shall hear more of it. We are being
frequently warned by grave voices that this is the
most important of the theories with which orthodoxy
or traditional Christianity is confronted. I shall,
of course, have to return to it, and to the others
just described. But for the present I leave them.
The method which I propose to follow is first of all
positive not negative. Confessedly all these theories
involve leaving out and repudiating as unhistorical
large elements in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts
as they stand. Now I am making no claim for
complete freedom from error in the Gospels. But
I have sought to establish x their claim to be regarded
as serious history compiled by competent men, which
must not be violently dealt with ; and I have given
my reasons at some length for refusing to regard the
strictly miraculous and supernatural elements in the
Gospel narratives as incredible on a priori grounds. 2

I do not propose to go over this ground again ; but
perhaps I had better briefly restate the position with
regard to the Gospels and Acts which it was sought
to establish in the first volume and which is to be
taken for granted in this.

The position is (1) that the second of our Gospels
was really written by John Mark, who from his
youth up had lived in his mother's house at Jerusalem,
at the very centre of the apostolic fellowship, and
had been afterwards the companion of his cousin
Barnabas and of St. Paul, and more particularly,

1 See Belief in God, chaps, viii. and xi.
a Belief in God, chaps, ix. and x.

42 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

according to an early and trustworthy tradition,
of St. Peter, whose customary teaching about the
things said and done by Christ he set himself to
reproduce as faithfully as possible ; (2) that the
third Gospel, which is based upon Mark's material,
and also upon another document containing matter
common to the third Gospel with the first, which is
commonly called Q, as well as upon information
from other " first-hand " sources, was really written
by the physician Luke, the companion of St. Paul,
who has explained his motive and his method in a
luminous preface to his Gospel, which its contents
amply vindicate ; and (3) that the Acts is part of
the same work as the Gospel, by the same author,
who had the fullest opportunities of obtaining trust-
worthy information about the beginnings of the
Christian Church. It follows that these books
ought to be taken, provisionally but in all serious-
ness, as credible historical documents, unless indeed
they should prove themselves otherwise.

I propose then that we should build the structure
of our argument in the main upon the Gospels of
St. Mark and St. Luke and upon the Acts, and upon
the other books of the New Testament which are
not involved in serious controversy, letting nothing of
importance rest upon the unsupported testimony of the
first Gospel and using the fourth only as subsidiary. 1

But I would call my readers' attention to the
fact that to-day controversy is not so much con-
cerned as formerly with the authenticity and date
of documents. Thus perhaps the most important
recent German work on " Christian origins " is that
of Eduard Meyer, the distinguished author of the
immense History of Antiquity (Geschichte des Alter-
thums). He comes to his task 2 therefore on the basis

1 But see below, Chapter IV., pp. 107 f.

1 The Ursprung u)id Anfdnge des Christenihwna, 1921, in two
volumes, awaiting a third.

JOHN THE BAPTIST 43

of very wide knowledge and a high general authority
as a historian. He talks with some impatience
of modern criticism as unreasonable, meaning, I
suppose, specially modern New Testament criticism. 1
He ascribes the third Gospel and the Acts to Luke 2
and the second Gospel to Mark, the " interpreter "
(Dolmetscher) of Peter, according to the tradition, 3
and recognizes the \vork of Matthew behind our
first Gospel. If he has in fact to give his readers
a conception of Jesus widely different from that of
the Evangelists, it is not because they were not in
a position to know the facts, but because he cannot
apparently conceive of the supernatural as being
really historical. 4 It is just this assumption that
I desire we should not take with us to our study
of the Evangelists, but should approach them with
an open mind and give them a chance to tell their
story as to those who have ears to hear.

II

All the Gospels put the activity of Jesus upon
the immediate background of the preaching of the
great prophet who deeply stirred Jewish society,
John the Baptist. Josephus, the Jewish historian,
gives some account of him as a good man and a
preacher of righteousness, who used baptism as
his instrument for gathering the followers of
righteousness together ; and tells us that because
of the great excitement which he caused among the

1 E.g. vol. i. p. 314 : " How that (i.e. that the author of the
Fourth Gospel intended to represent himself as being John the son
of Zebedee) can have been called in question is one of the many
things which remain unintelligible to me in the positions of modern
criticism."

See p. 51. 3 p. 169>

4 See, for example, his account of the Last Supper, pp. 174 ff.,
and of the saying of Matt, xi 25 ff., p. 291.

44 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

people and the persuasive power over them which
he showed, Herod put him to death for fear he should
cause some rebellion ; and he thought it better to
act betimes and put him out of the way rather than
to repent at leisure for having done nothing. 1 In
all the Gospels he is presented to us, not only as a
preacher of righteousness, who revived the memories
of the old prophets by the tremendous force of his
denunciations and encouragements, but also as one
who was conscious of a definite mission to proclaim the
immediate advent of the Kingdom of God, to herald
the Christ who was to come, and " to make ready
a people prepared for the Lord.*' 2

There are matters of detail concerning the Baptist
on which the Gospels appear to disagree, but on the
chief points which alone concern our present enquiry
we may feel sure.

(1) The spirit of ancient prophecy revived in John
in the sense especially that for him the coming of
the Kingdom was as far as possible from being some-
thing which the nation, as it was, could afford to
welcome. Their eager nationalism was not enough.
God who was to visit them in the coming of His

1 Antiq. xviii. 52. Josephus' particular phrases are obscure,
though the general sense is plain. The editors of the Beginnings of
Christianity, pp. 101 ff., put a definite meaning on Josephus which,
I think, Mr. Creed (J.T.S., Oct. 1921, p. 59) has shown to be
mistaken.

The motive assigned to Herod for John's imprisonment is not
necessarily exclusive of the motive assigned by the Gospels. His
motives may well have been mixed. It has been pointed out
(Belief in God, p. 206) that Josephus, writing always to conciliate
Roman opinion, observes a discreet silence about Christianity ;
and his silence about any relation of John to Jesus should not be
allowed to discredit the Gospel account.

The phrase, " the kingdom of heaven is at hand," occurs only
in St. Matthew iii 2 ; but the same message ia implied in all the
other Gospels. Schweitzer tries to persuade us that he behoved
himself sent to prepare for not the Christ, but Elijah, who was
to precede Christ. But ** the mightier than I, the latchet of whose
shoes I am unworthy to stoop down and unloose," who " shall
baptize you with the Holy Ohost " (Mark i 7, 8), can be none other
than the Christ.

THE WITNESS OF THE BAPTIST 45

Christ would take no account of their descent from
Abraham. He demanded a holy people ; and
sinners in Zion, however alert their national zeal,
had as good cause as in the days of Isaiah to tremble
at the approach of the day of God as before devouring
fire and everlasting burnings. A fundamental
change of mind was needed, and John's baptism
was the symbol of admission to a new Israel a
" people prepared for the Lord."

(2) It is the testimony of all the Gospels that
John not only announced the immediate coming of
the Kingdom and the Christ, but recognized Jesus,
on the occasion of His coming to his baptism, as
" the greater one " who was to come. The meagre-
ness of Mark's narrative, till he reaches (at ver. 14)
the Galilean ministry, suggests that only at that
point did his special information begin. What
precedes is a bare summary of what everyone knew.
But his brief narrative implies that, though the
vision of the opening heaven and the descending
Spirit was for Jesus only, the divine voice was for
John also whether heard with his outward ear
or only in his inward spirit, like the word of the
Lord by the old prophets, we need not enquire
and it proclaimed Jesus the Son of God, by which
was then understood, I think, neither more nor less
than the Christ. This information must have been
conveyed, we should suppose, by John himself to
some of the first disciples ; and St. Peter in the
Acts represents the companionship of the apostles
with one another and with the Lord Jesus as
" beginning from the baptism of John." * There
are differences in detail among the Gospels, 2 but
there is a common witness which we have no reason
for hesitating to accept.

But with the narrative of the Galilean ministry
of Jesus, we get upon the ground of chief importance.
1 Acts i 2 1-2. * See appended note p. 68.

46 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

III

If we are to do our best to judge of the impression
produced by Jesus upon the first group of His
disciples, and especially upon those who came closest
to Him and whom He chose to be " the Twelve,"
we should read, at one sitting, with as fresh and free
a mind as possible, ignoring difficulties of detail, the
Gospel of St. Mark down to the beginning of the
Passion narrative, and then, again at one sitting, the
Gospel of St. Luke from the beginning of the ministry
down to the Passion, and then at least the Sermon on
the Mount and the Parables in St. Matthew. What
follows represents my often-renewed impression of
such readings, of the justice of which my readers
must judge.

To speak in the most general terms, I submit that
whatever previous ideas may have been in the minds
of these disciples concerning the purpose of God for
Israel, and concerning His kingdom and the Christ
who was to come, were quite overwhelmed by a
new influence or impression which threw everything
else into the background the overwhelming im-
pression of the person of Jesus " the Son of Man,"
or " the Man," as He called Himself.

I do not think it is possible to doubt (1) that the
evangelists intend to convey the impression that
Jesus, habitually from the beginning of His ministry,
called Himself the Son of Man. 1

(2) That He really so called Himself. Seeing that,
except on one occasion, when Stephen, at the moment
of his martyrdom, calls Jesus the Son of Man, with
obvious reference to His own words before the San-
hedrin (Mark xiv 62), the first Christians, according

1 See Beginnings, pp. 3747 : " The opinion of the writers of
the GospeJs is thus clear that Jesus used the phrase ; that he
used it of Himself." *' The writers understand Jesus to refer to
Himself. 1 * So also Bousset, Kyrios Christos, pp. 5 ff.

THE SON OF MAN 47

to the evidence, did not use this title of their Lord
at all, or in addressing Him, it seems the extreme of
perversity to maintain that the attribution of the
title to Jesus is due to the early community, 1 and
that He probably did not in fact use the title as a
designation of Himself.

(3) That, whereas after Peter's confession of His
Messiahship, the title acquires in the mouth of Jesus
a quite distinctive Messianic significance, it was as
first used by Him plainly not intended or understood
in a Messianic sense at all. For we are repeatedly
told that Jesus was refusing to make any public
claim to be the Messiah. The Aramaic word, trans-
lated Son of Man, would apparently have meant
simply " the man." Its use by Jesus may be com-
pared to its frequent use in the case of Ezechiel as
the name by which the divine voice called him.
There it signifies that he is a man, and also a man
singled out for a special vocation. 2 So also in Ps.
viii 4 it represents mankind viewed, as we may say,
in the ideal. I suppose when our Lord first so called
Himself, quite without reference to Messianic dis-
tinction or glory, 3 He meant His hearers to think of
Him as " the man " in some specially representative
sense, though I should shrink from such a modern-
sounding phrase as " the ideal man."

The Jews were distinguished by profound rever-
ence for their teachers, who were primarily teachers
of religion, and those who heard Jesus came very
speedily to regard Him as a great teacher sent from
God. They were impressed at starting by the novelty
of His teaching. " What is this ? " men cried out.
" A new teaching ! " 4 Already they had heard what
seemed a new teaching from John the Baptist. If in

1 So Boueset and Kirsopp Lake.

2 See Ezech. ii 1, iii 1, and constantly.

3 Aa in Mark ii 10, 28, Luke vii 34, ix 58, x 10 (all from Q).
Mark i 27.

48 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

substance it was the teaching of the ancient prophets
revived, yet, at least by contrast to what many
generations of the people had received from their
official guides, or by comparison with popular ideas
about the Christ who was to come and the kingdom
of God, it was very new teaching which they heard
from John. And doubtless they were prepared for
the like from Jesus. But what they heard for in-
stance in the sermon given by St. Luke, or the longer
version, the " Sermon on the Mount " in St. Matthew,
or the teaching about the merely relative obligation
of the Sabbath, or about the new wine which could
not be put into old bottles, or about sin having its
seat only in the heart the great saying of which
St. Mark l says that it " cleansed all meats," or again
our Lord's estimate of the absolute worth of every
human soul all this no doubt struck in their hearts
a profounder and richer note of novelty than any-
thing said by John the Baptist. 2

Moreover, we are bound to believe that some of
the disciples at least were impressed sufficiently to
be able to treasure the words of Jesus doubtless in
many cases the often-repeated words and to repro-
duce them accurately, with even sharp precision.
This was in the Jewish schools the quite normal
faculty of the pupils of any teacher. 3 We may be
prepared to maintain against all corners that the
reports in the Synoptic Gospels of the words of Jesus
bear, with not much exception, the quite unmistak-
able stamp of genuineness. This, I think, must be
the verdict of the literary sense. Nevertheless, it
is also quite apparent that the disciples had very

1 St. Mark vii 19.

* There are admirable modern accounts of the ethical teaching
of our Lord, amongst which I still think Ecce Homo pre-eminent.
But in this book I am concerned only with the estimate of our
Lord's person and restrain myself from the consideration of His
teaching.

8 See Belief in God, pp. 191-2.

THE IMPRESSION OF THE PERSON 49

little intelligent perception, during our Lord's human
lifetime, of His meaning. They were capable of what
we cannot but call stupid misunderstandings. They
were even astonishingly dense, unimaginative, and
unsympathetic. It would be quite untrue, we feel
as we read, to interpret the influence of Jesus upon
them as the influence of His teaching upon receptive
pupils. It really was not in the main the substance
of His teaching that was gradually making them
new men. Unmistakably it was the commanding
authority of His person and their unbounded faith
in Him. 1

Critics of the orthodox tradition are always re-
proving the theologians for having overstated the
prominence of the person, and the personal claim,
of Jesus. " To lay down any ' doctrine ' about his
person and his dignity, independently of the Gospel,
was quite outside his sphere of ideas." 2 " He does
not talk about himself." 3 The measure of truth in
such statements we shall have to consider later. But
let there be no mistake. The dominant influence of
Jesus upon the disciples did not lie in anything that
He taught them, whether about Himself or about God
or about the kingdom of God, but in " The Man "
Himself in the impression of overwhelming authority,
certainly supernatural and " of God," resident in Him.

It is this that constrains them at the beginning to
leave all and follow Him. It is authority which
expresses itself in His works of healing, especially,
but not only, the healing of the possessed. The
sense of it is vividly presented to us in the case of

1 Simkhovitch, op. cit. p. 78, has a very good passage about the
difference in powerful movements which stir mankind between
faith in ideas and understanding of ideas : " Do not think for the
moment that it is understanding of the ideas which moves man-
kind ; it is their faith in the ideas." With the disciples it was not
even yet faith in the ideas of Jesus. It was simply a bewildered
confidence in Him.

> Harnack, What is Christianity ? p. 129.

3 Beginnings of Christianity, p. 288.

CT IIAWVC r/>! ! C/"C

50 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

one who was neither a disciple nor a Jew the
Roman centurion who had been paying attention
to Jesus, and had gained the conviction that He
occupied in nature a position comparable to his own
in the army. No doubt, that is to say, He was
" under authority " the authority of God ; but
within the sphere of His activity He could do as He
willed with nature, as the centurion could with his
subordinates. " With authority He commands," and
it obeys Him. He speaks, and it is done. 1 So again
it is that the ruler of the synagogue falls at His feet
full of belief in His power. 2 That is the impression.
His authority in working what we call miracles and
what the Gospels call " powers " is paralleled by His
moral authority. He taught as He worked, " as one
having authority " of a divine kind in Himself. So
as " the Man " He claims to forgive the sins of the
paralytic and, to prove His right to do so, He heals
his disease. And in teaching He does not generally,
though He does at times, refer beyond Himself
' This is the word of the Lord," or " Thus saith
Scripture." Even in revising the divinely-given law
of Sinai, it was enough to say " But I say unto you."
Many moderns seem quite to underestimate or
almost to ignore this overwhelming impression of
authority. The disciples are being led to believe
that in the physical world, though He will do nothing
to help Himself, He can do anything to help those
in need, or themselves, His companions. Such was
doubtless the impression of His feeding of the five
thousand out of so miserably inadequate a supply, or
rescuing the disciples suddenly, when they roused Him
out of sleep in the storm at sea. They were growing
to believe that He would be equal to all the emer-
gencies which might occur. And in the moral sphere
His word was enough. They could not question it.
And though He did not seem to know everything, yet
i Matt, viii 5-13, Luke vii 1-10. Mark v 22.

HIS IMPLIED CLAIM 55

He had a strange power of reading men's hearts ; and
at times He spoke as if He were the final judge of
men, not only in view of their public acts but of their
secret lives. In certain of the parables this assump-
tion that He is the final judge is plain. 1 But it is
implied elsewhere. We think of such a saying as
" Many shall come to me in that day . . . then will
I protest unto them, I never knew you." 2 Here what
is implied, both in St. Matthew and St. Luke's
version, is that nothing matters to a man at last
except the judgment of Jesus on him, and that this
judgment goes to the heart of the reality and cannot
be misled by appearances or professions. So else-
where we hear that to deny Him and be ashamed of
Him here in this world means to be disowned by
Him at last, and that that is the final disaster. 3 He
is the ultimate judge.

There are three other kindred features in the im-
pression which our Lord plainly made on His disciples
which we shall note. He spoke as being infallible.
He was indeed as far as possible from being a dog-
matic teacher who loved to teach men a secret lore
ex cathedra. There was nothing about Him of this
tone. And He did not shrink from telling the
disciples of something which was not within His
knowledge. But whatever He did teach, He taught
as if it were certainly true, and (unlike the prophets
who delivered a message from God) as if the fountain

1 So most dramatically in Matt, xxv 19. I know that St,
Matthew seerns at times to heighten the Messianic colouring of ou?
Lord's sayings. But I agree with Sanday (The Life of Christ in
Recent Research, p. 128, note 1) that it is wanton to doubt this
parable. See also the Tares, Matt, xiii 41, and the Talents,
Luke xix 1 1 and Matt, xxv 14. Dr. Rashdall, Conscience and Christ f
p. 48, seeks to substantiate the doubt whether our Lord ever spoke
of Himself as the actual judge. But the witness that He did i
not only St. Matthew's.

2 Matt, vii 22 ; cf. Luke xiii 24 L, which is vivid and clear in
its implication.

3 Mark viii 38, Luke ix 26, Matt, x 33 ; cf. Luke xxi 36 " To
stand before the Son of Man."

52 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

of truth was in Himself. " No man knoweth the
Father save the Son and he to whomsoever the Son
willeth to reveal Him." " Heaven and earth shall
pass away, but my words shall not pass away."
Secondly, there was not in His language the least
trace of a sense of sinfulness, or even possible un-
worthiness, such as has possessed at all times prophets
and seers. Finally, there was an exclusiveness about
His claim on men, as if He were not merely one of
the representatives of God but in some profound
sense the only one. He appears, indeed, to delegate
to the Twelve and the Seventy authority to teach
and to heal diseases, but this is in His name or in
utter dependence on Him. In Himself He seems to
brook no rival. " Come unto me," He says, " and
I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and
learn of me." " He that loveth father or mother
more than me, is not worthy of me." " Follow me
and let the dead bury their own dead." This sort
of language seems to breathe nothing less than the
divine jealousy over human souls.

Now all this time questions were pending in the
minds of the disciples as to who He was. There was
some secret, some mystery, about His person.

The report of the divine voice at the baptism, the
story of the temptation in the wilderness which
Jesus must at some time have communicated to
them, the strange cries of the demoniacs " Thou
art the Son of God the holy one of God," and their
horror of Him as of some awful power, and also
certain solemn and hardly intelligible words of His
own, made them conscious of a mystery. There
were names, "Son of Man," "Son of God," "Christ,"
which were in their ears and would have to be ex-
plained. But while all this process of questioning
was going on, something deeper was happening.
Beyond all possibility of question, and seemingly by
His own deliberate intention, Jesus, so far as they

AUT DEUS AUT HOMO NON BONUS 53

yielded their faith to Him, was taking the place of
God, or in modern phrase gaining " the values of
God," for their souls. Not all the values of God.
They did not, I suppose, at that time dream of Him
as the creator of the world and the ruler of the course
of nature. No doubt they thought of Him as wholly
under God. But within the sphere of their personal
lives, He had been growing to have to them the
values of God, as the object of their absolute faith,
their infallible refuge and informer and protector
and guide.

This seems to me quite an irresistible impression.
There is an old saying of unknown origin either
Jesus Christ was God or He was not a good man
which critics sometimes treat with great derision. I
do not think it can be so derided. There is more
in it than they seem to recognize. How could men
be in the constant companionship of the Jesus of
the Synoptic Gospels such as we have been seeking
to describe Him, surely without exaggeration
without coming to be in the attitude towards Him
which is only legitimate towards God ? And was
He not deliberately encouraging, and bringing about
this attitude towards Himself in their souls ? Did
He not exhibit the sort of exclusive claim which
suggests nothing else but the " jealousy " of God ?
And is it not the supreme sin of pride or arrogance
for any man, even a commissioned prophet, to allow
himself to assume this exclusive position ? Must
not every commissioned servant be always crying
" Send, O Lord, by whom thou wilt send ! Thou
hast many messengers and all of them subject to
error and weakness, I most of all " ? The implica-
tion of infallible, exclusive authority which seems
to inhere in the words and tone of Jesus does
seem to me to express, if not the jealousy of God,
then some such quality as lies at the heart of all
spiritual tyranny and false sacerdotalism.

54 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

IV

We have now to consider the question of the
person of Jesus from another point of view, that is,
of the titles by which He was called or by which He
called Himself. I have argued that if we regard
the Synoptic Gospels as giving us good history, we
must also regard it as certain that John the Baptist
pointed to Jesus as the Christ who was to come, and
did so on the ground, in part at least, of the divine
voice heard by himself at the baptism of Jesus pro-
claiming Him " the beloved Son in whom God was
well pleased." The record of the baptism as given
in the Gospels would have come, we should suppose,
from John. Whether " the voice," either on this
occasion or at the Transfiguration, was one which
an indifferent by-stander would have heard with
his ears, or whether it came, like " the word of the
Lord " to the prophets, only to the spiritual hearing,
we need not discuss, any more than the question
whether the narrative of the temptation, which I
suppose our Lord related to the Twelve, is
intended as an allegoric expression of events which
happened only in Christ's consciousness or as a
record of outward events. 1 In either case it is
certain that Jesus was believed by Himself and by
John to have been divinely certified at His baptism
as the Son of God and the temptation of Jesus in-
volved His consciousness that He was so. 2 So

1 Though, for myself, I can feel no doubt (with Origen) that the
former is the true interpretation ; see Epistles of St. John, pp. 236-7.

2 I see no sign whatever in the Gospels of any advance in our
Lord's estimate of His own person. This idea, which is constantly
asserted, as if it were to be taken for granted, may or may not be
open to theological objection, but the question need not be raised.
There is no evidence. And whether the word of God at the
baptism, " In thee I have been well pleased " (euSo/crjo-o), refers
to the past of the human life of Jesus or to the " eternal past " or to
the Christ as prefigured in prophecy, it certainly does not support
the idea that the moment of baptism made any difference to His
Sonship. The " Western " reading of St. Luke iii 22, " Thou art

THE SON OF GOD 55

says the only story we have of His childhood the
scene in the Temple when He was twelve years old
" Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's
business," or "in my Father's house." It follows
that those who received the testimony of John and
Jesus believed Him to be truly, in some sense, the
Son of God, and when they heard the demoniacs
so hailing Him and heard Jesus seeking to silence
them, they must have felt that there was mystery
attaching to this title ; but on the whole, they
probably simply identified it in meaning with the
Christ, the king of David's line in whom God's
promises to Israel were to be fulfilled, neither more
nor less. It would not appear that till St. Paul
comes on the scene the Church generally realized
its true significance. 1 It is true that there is no
evidence of the title Son of God being used in the
later Jewish literature of the Christ, but it was
twice used of the Son of David or of David in the
Psalms 2 and of the righteous man in the Book of
Wisdom, 3 and the evidence appears to be conclusive
that the disciples took it as meaning no more than
the Christ. 4

my beloved son ; on this day have I begotten tliee," is surely due
to a reminiscence of Ps. ii 7.

1 See later, pp. 7Sff.

* Ps. ii (which is treated as Messianic in the Psalms of Solomon)
verses 7 and (perhaps) 12, and Ixxxix 26-7. See Dalman's Words
of Jesus (Eng. trans.), pp. 268 ft

a Wisdom ii 16, 18.

So it appears to have been understood when the demoniacs
hailed Him by the title " Son of God," in Mark iii 11, v 7 ; cf.
Matt, viii 29, Luke viii 28 : "He suffered not the devils to speak
because they knew him " i.e. knew Him as Christ ; cf. Luke
iv 41, where, after the exclamation " Thou art the Son of God,"
is the explanation " They knew that he was the Christ." So at
the trial, Matt, xxvi 63, and parallels in Mark and Luke ; and
when our Lord is mocked upon the Cross (see Matt, xxvii 40-3 ;
cf. Mark xv 32). St. Matthew seems to represent the disciples as
identifying " Son of God " with Christ hi the confession of Peter,
xvi 15. The same appears to be the representation of John i 49.
The " King of Israel " is the synonym for " the Son of God."

56 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

This, however, is by no means true of the sense
in which our Lord used it of Himself. The great
passage, " No one knoweth the Son save the Father :
neither doth any know the Father save the Son,"
which occurs in both St. Matthew and St. Luke,
and with its wonderful context is authentic beyond
reasonable dispute, asserts a relationship of mutual
knowledge between Father and Son which suggests
something essential and eternal. 1 So the phrase
" Of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even
the angels in heaven, neither the Son," 2 which again
must surely be authentic, because no later believer
would have attributed such limitation of knowledge
to the Christ, suggests at least a super-angelic son-
ship. Once more in the parable of the husbandmen
Jesus distinguishes Himself as the only Son sharply
from all the other messengers of God. 3 As I have
said, it would not appear as if these utterances made
much impression at the time. The thoughts of the

i Matt, xi 27, Luke x 22. See Dalmaii, pp. 283, 285: "But
in this case of mutual understanding, its thoroughness [i.e.
the thoroughness of mutual knowledge] and absolute infallibility
are assumed. He who stands in so uniquely close a relation to
God is the only possible mediator of the kind, and also at the same
time the absolutely reliable revealer of the whole wealth of the
divine mysteries." . . . " The passages appear to imply that Jesua
had shown 110 cognizance of any beginning in this relationship.
It seems to be an innate property of His personality." See also
Harnack, Sayings of Jesu# (Eng. trans., Williams and Norgate),
p. 302. " A formal likeness of Father and Son, who are distin-
guished only by the different names, and a relationship of Father
and Son which never had a beginning, but remains ever the same,"
is here expressed. This is unacceptable to Harnack and, quite
arbitrarily, he omits part of the text. Other writers make the whole
passage the work of a later Jewish Christian prophet, basing himself
on Ecclus. li 1, 23, 26, 27. But this sort of criticism can dissolve
any evidence. I shall recur to the passage later (see pp. 89 f, 109 f).

We notice that our Lord never speaks to the disciples of "our
Father,'* except in giving them for their use the Lord's Prayer.
He speaks of " your Father," or " the Father," and of " my
Father." This appears with express emphasis in John xx 17.
But it is apparent also in the Synoptists,

3 Matt, xiii 32 and Matt, xxiv 30 (R.V.).

3 Mark xii 6 ; also Matthew and Luke.

THE CHRIST 57

disciples were confined to the question, Is he the
Christ ? But they have survived among our Lord's
most indisputable words, and they seem to me to
bear beyond question the sense of a sonship unique,
superhuman and essential. There is not really much
difference between what they involve and what is
taught in the discourses of St. John.

It is profoundly characteristic of what I have
called our Lord's undogmatic method that He should
have uttered these solemn sayings w r hich seem
to open out such momentous glimpses into the
mystery of His personality but, as it were, in-
cidentally or by implication only, and left them
as germs to fertilize later in men's minds. So with
regard to His being the Christ, though in that case
there were many suggestions from without, He chose
that the conviction of His messiahship should mature
in their own minds and become a confession of their
own lips, not something dictated to them by Him.
Thus, under circumstances of deepening anxiety,
and in or near a city the very name of which
Caesarea Philippi spoke of alien and foreign in-
fluences repugnant to the heart of every Jew, He
asked them the question, " Who do men say that
I am ? " and then pressed home upon them the more
searching question, " But who do ye say that I
am ? " and Peter replied with the great confession,
" Thou art the Christ." It was a decisive moment,
and it strikes us as most natural that our Lord
should have signalized the greatness of the moment
by meeting the confession with the solemn and
rich benediction which Matthew alone records :
" Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona, for this is
not anything thou hast learnt by human influence.
It is a real disclosure made by my heavenly Father
in thy souL It is a conviction wrought in thee
by God."

Henceforth, though the world is not at present to

58 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

know it, the secret that Jesus is the Christ is an open
secret in the apostolic company, and Jesus proceeds
at once to build upon it in the way most calculated to
test them and terrify them. " From that time began
Jesus to show unto His disciples, how that he must
go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the
elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed
and the third day be raised up." This prophecy
is made " openly " and repeated again and again. 1
The ideas suggested were profoundly contrary
to the vague and elastic, but always glorious and
radiant, ideas of the Messianic king which the Jews,
and the disciples amongst them, entertained. They
had all along had cause for anxiety as to whether
the crowds drawn by the " powers " and by the
words of their Master were the prelude to His real
triumph. It was quite plain that there was a wide
interval between welcoming His words and wonderful
benefits and really obeying from the heart His search-
ing doctrine. Of the latter there was no sign on any
large scale. And the leaders of the nation appeared
to be all against Him. Nevertheless there had been
something radiant and triumphant about their earlier
experiences with Him in Galilee. Nothing less is
implied in the description which Jesus gave of His
company, in explanation of their having no special
fasts of their own, such as the Pharisees had, and
John's disciples. He compared them to a happy
band of friends round a bridegroom in the moment of
his joy and triumph. No doubt He struck the note
of loss and sorrow to come " The days will come
when the bridegroom shall be taken away from
them " but the present scenery is painted in radiant
colours. It might be a fitting prelude for the glorious
days of the Messiah. But anxiety had deepened ;
and now, just when they had given full expression
to their faith that He verily was the Christ, He let

1 Mark viii 31, ix 12, 31, x 33-4.

THE SUFFERING SERVANT 59

the blow fall upon them in all its weight, and drove
it down upon them again and again. The way of
the Christ was to be the way of the Cross, the way of
failure and death. And Peter's impulsive protest
brought upon him the sternest rebuke " Get thee
behind me, Satan ! "

We cannot doubt that this profound change in the
idea of the Christ was effected by our Lord's identi-
fying Himself, the Son of Man, with the Suffering
Servant of Jehovah in the later Isaiah. In these
wonderful chapters (Is. xl onward) " the servant of
Jehovah " is first Israel in general (xli 8 f.), and then
apparently the select remnant of the people, who
alone are the true Israel (xlix 1-3), through whom
alone the purpose of God can realize itself. But
though no doubt the prophet begins by using " the
Servant " as a personification of the nation or group
within the nation, yet he appears to be carried away
as he contemplates the Servant to think of him as a
real person who is by his obedience and his unde-
served sufferings and death to win the redemption
of " the many." We feel this already in earlier
passages, 1 but the impression becomes overwhelming
in the familiar passage (Hi 13 and liii), which sounds
to us for the most part, as we hear it, as simply the
history of the passion of Jesus written beforehand.
I will present the passage in Dr. Driver's careful
analysis 2 :

The preface in cap. lii 13-15 describes " the ideal
servant's exaltation after an antecedent period of humilia-
tion and distress." Then this is developed in cap. liii.
The first part (1-9) presents " three several stages in
the ideal Servant's humiliation : the persons speaking
are the Israelites, represented as at length perceiving
the truth to which they had before been blind, and

1 E.g. 1 4-10.

2 Isaiah, his Life andJTimea (Nisbet), pp. 152-5, very slightly
abbreviated.

60 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

reviewing the period of their incredulity. First, in spite
of the prophetic report, or message, pointing to him,
few or none, they say, amongst his nation recognized
him : he had no outward grace, or beauty of form,
attracting attention ; he grew up in their midst like some
mean or lowly shrub, struggling to maintain itself in
an arid soil : men despised him, and even held aloof
from him in aversion. In truth, however," [so they pro-
ceed to confess], they themselves were the occasion of
his distressed appearance : "he was bearing the conse-
quences of our sins, although we in our blindness imagined
him to be stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted "
i.e. smitten, as by a divine judgment, for some heinous
offence " whereas, in fact, it was we who had gone
astray, and the penalty, instead of recoiling upon us,
lighted in its entirety upon him. So far from being
guilty himself, he bore the guilt of others and relieved
them of its penal consequences. Though he suffered
willingly, and made no answer to his accusers, he was
still oppressed : first imprisoned by an unjust sentence,
he was afterwards led away to execution, not one among
his contemporaries considering that he was thus cut off,
not for his own sins, but for those of the people. In
spite of the innocence of his life, his death was that of
a malefactor and his end inglorious."

[The final paragraph, however, reverses the character
of the scene and introduces the promise for the future.]
" It was Jehovah's pleasure thus to bruise him : but out
of death will spring a new life : after his soul has been
made a guilt offering, he will live again, enjoy long life,
and be rewarded with the satisfaction of seeing God's
work, or ' pleasure ' prosper in his hand. Possessed of
an intimate ' knowledge ' of the dealings and purposes
of God, he will l justify the many,' whilst his final reward
for having submitted to the death of a transgressor will
be that he will be ranked as a conqueror and honoured
among the great ones of the earth : inasmuch as ' he bore
the sins of the many and made intercession for the trans-
gressors.' '

This astonishing vision of the prophet appears to
have made little or no permanent impression on the

THE CHRIST MUST SUFFER 61

imagination of Israel. 1 Its idea of kingship quite
escaped them. They never identified the glorious
Messiah with the Suffering Servant. This was the
work of Jesus. Some modern critics have ventured
to doubt whether Jesus shows the influence of this
prophecy. But, I think, quite unreasonably. Two
points seem to prove it : (1) that our Lord plainly
regards the sufferings of the Christ and His death
as necessary because prefigured in Scripture. 2 " How
is it written of the Son of Man ? " " The Son of
Man goeth as it is written of Him." " How, then,
should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must
be ? " And the same intense conviction of prophecy
and fulfilment appears in the earliest Church, 8 and
it appears from the beginning associated with the
figure of the " servant of Jehovah." 4 Indeed it
could hardly have been otherwise, for, though the
Old Testament may provide types and suggestions
of the idea of a suffering Christ, it contains nothing
which can be compared with Isaiah liii in vividness
and impressiveness.

(2) Our Lord seems plainly to identify Himself
with " the Servant," when He quotes from the
" Servant " section of Isaiah to interpret His mission
at Nazareth, 5 and St. Luke also represents Him

1 It left apparent traces on certain psalms and on the books of
Job and Maccabees (see below, pp. 285 f ), but it never became recog-
nized for its importance in the Jewish tradition. In the Targum
on Is. liii, which haa recently been translated by the Rev. R. B.
Aytoun (see J.T.S., Jan. 1922, pp. 179-80), the Servant is inter-
preted of the Messiah, but, by a violent perversion of the sense of
the passage, all the marks of ignominy and shame are diverted from
him upon his people and his adversaries. This is a most curious
document.

1 Mark ix 12, cf. Matt, xxvi 24, 54, 56, Luke xviii 31, xxiv
25-7, 46.

3 1 Cor. xv 3, Acts ii 23, xvii 2-3, xxvi 22-3, 1 Peter i 10-11.

4 See Acts iii 13 " His servant Jesus," and 26, and iv 27, 30
" Thy holy servant Jesus." So Philip expounds to the eunuch,
viii 31 ff. So 1 Peter ii 21 ff. and Matt, viii 17.

6 Luke iv 1 8, from Is. Ixi. Driver is surely right in representing
these words as put in the mouth of the Servant.

62 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

as quoting of His own end the words concerning the
Servant, " He was reckoned with transgressors." l
But perhaps more convincing in their originality
are the two passages in St. Mark where our
Lord speaks of Himself as to give His life a
" ransom Jor many" and of the cup, at the Last
Supper, as " this is my blood of the covenant which
is shed Jor many." 2 It does not seem to me to be
doubtful that this " for many," twice repeated, is a
reference to Isaiah liii. " My righteous servant shall
justify many" " He bare the sin of man?/." 3 This
is all the more noticeable because the significance
of the precise word does not seem to have been
perceived, so that it has vanished from the versions
of St. Luke and St. Paul.

Our Lord then, who was plainly set radically to
revise the conception of the Christ, and who, though
He did not disclaim His Davidic descent, yet was
manifestly anxious not to emphasize it, 4 deeply
involved as it was in ideas of temporal sovereignty,
sought to effect His purpose by identifying the
Christ, as no one had done before Plim, 5 with the
Suffering Servant, and that by associating both with
the title He had chosen for Himself the Son of
Man or the Man. Henceforth the Man, the Christ,
and the Suffering Servant are the same person. And
one more step had to be taken to complete our
Lord's profoundly new doctrine of the Christ, and
that was, as the sequel to suffering and death, to

1 Luke xxii 37.

2 Mark x 46, xiv 24 ; so also in St. Matthew, cf. Heb. ix 28, Rom.
v 15.

3 Is. liii 11, 12. In the LXX the word 7roA\o?s, TTO\\OVS, TTO\\WV
recurs three times. Also as one reads the LXX of Is. liii 12
nap*$6dr) t!s Qavarov it is difficult to doubt that this phrase pro-
moted the constant use of this verb in connection with our Lord's
betrayal and surrender to death.

4 On our Lord's Davidic descent as a real fact, see Dalman,
op. cit. pp. 316ff.

6 Unless, indeed, John the Baptist : see John i 29.

THE SON OF MAN IN GLORY 63

introduce in a new form, what was already suggested
in Isaiah liii, the idea of resurrection and glory. In
a new form for He identified the Christ with the
figure of glorified manhood in the visions of Daniel.

The passage has been already quoted and its
original sense explained. It is an image of the
people of God, by the side of the world-empires
imaged in the four great beasts " And I saw in the
night visions, and behold there came with the clouds
of heaven one like unto a son of man, and he came
even to the Ancient of Days. . . . And there was
given him dominion and glory and a kingdom, that
all the people, nations and languages should serve
him ; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which
shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which
shall not be destroyed." Now, I have already
explained how probably before our Lord's time, in
the Similitudes of the Book of Enoch, this figure of
the chosen people was converted into the figure of
a heavenly being, " The Elect One," pre-existing in
the heavens, who at the end of the world was to
be manifested in glory as the agent of divine judg-
ment, seated on the very throne of God. This
being, first described as in countenance like a man
and possibly called " The Son of Man," l is the
"Anointed One," and, as one may say, is a sub-
stitute for the old prophetic Messiah. This is a
truer expression than to say He is identified with the
Messiah, for He has no connection with any earthly
son of David in the imagination of the Apocalyptic
writer. Now I have insisted that it must be
regarded as certain that "The 'Son of Man" was
not a term which for the crowd or the disciples
carried with it Messianic associations w r hen our
Lord first used it. It was our Lord who first for
them identified the Son of Man both with the
Suffering Servant and with the Christ, the Son of
1 For doubts on this subject see above, p. 31.

G4 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

David. But I think it is most probable that the
Book of Enoch had already interpreted the human
figure in Daniel as being not an image of the nation,
but a mysterious person, who is to be manifested in the
clouds as God's vice-gerent in judgment at the end
of the world, and had given this interpretation of
Daniel such currency that our Lord can use it as a
means of extending the meaning of His own title,
the Son of Man,* and giving to the conception of the
Christ its new meaning. 1

We had better have before us the Pharisee's con-
ception of the Christ to come and the Apocalyptic
conception of the Son of Man, that we may see
how our Lord both fused and remodelled them.

We take the Psalms of Solomon, dating from a
Pharisaic source about a generation before our
Lord's birth, and in the 17th Psalm we find this
account of the Christ :

" Behold, O Lord, and raise up unto them their king,
the Son of David, at the time which thou sawest,
O God, that he may reign over Israel, thy servant,
and gird him with strength that he may shatter
unrighteous rulers. Purge Jerusalem from nations that
trample her down to destruction. . . . He will not
suffer unrighteousness to lodge any more in the midst
of his people ; nor shall there dwell with them any man
that knoweth wickedness ; for he shall know them,
that they are all sons of their God. and he shall distribute
them in their tribes upon the earth, and no sojourner or
foreigner shall sojourn any more among them." 2

This is the old prophetic vision, only without any
of the wide hope which is found in many of the old
prophets for all the nations of the earth. There is
in this Psalm nothing but destruction for the heathen.

1 It must be remembered that on all showing the Jewish Messianic
ideas were confused and vague. Our Lord seems first to have given
them spiritual coherence.

2 Psalms of Solomon, xvii 23-5, 29-31.

THE BOOK OF ENOCH 65

And the method of the Christ-King is to be the
method of the ruthless conqueror. We have seen
already how utterly our Lord repudiated any such
conception of the office of the Christ, and both pro-
foundly spiritualized and universalized the concep-
tion of the Kingdom. He went back to the noblest
form of the ancient vision, and far beyond it.

Then let us take the Apocalyptic conception of
the Elect One from the Similitudes of Enoch, based
manifestly on the vision of the Book of Daniel.

" And there I saw one who had a head of days, and
His head was white like wool, and with Him was another
being whose countenance had the appearance of a man,
and his face was full of graciousness like one of the holy
angels. And I asked the angel who went with me and
showed me all the hidden things, concerning that Son of
Man, who he was, and whence he was, and why he went
with the Head of Days. And he answered and said
unto me : This is the Son of Man who hath righteous-
ness, with whom dwelleth righteousness, and who re-
vealeth all the treasures of that which is hidden. . . .
And this Son of Man whom thou hast seen . . . shall
loosen the loins of the strong and break the teeth of the
sinners . . . and darkness shall be their dwelling, and
worms shall be their bed . . . because they do not
extol the name of the Lord of spirits." " At that hour
the Son of Man was named in the presence of the Lord
of Spirits, and his name before the Head of Days. . . .
He shall be the staff to the righteous whereon to stay
themselves and not fall, and he shall be the light of the
Gentiles, and the hope of those who are troubled in
heart. . . . And he hath been chosen and hidden before
Him, before the creation of the world and for evermore."
" And he sat on the throne of his glory, and the sum of
judgment was given unto the Son of Man, and he caused
the sinners to pass away and be destroyed from off the
face of the earth, and those who have led the world
astray." 1

l The Book of Enoch (Dr. Charles's translation), xlvi, xlviii
2, 4, 6, hdx 27.

66 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

If this, as seems probable, is really a writing
which dates before the time of our Lord, and the
passages just quoted are not, as a whole, Christian
interpolations, 1 which again seems probable, we need
not doubt that this interpretation of Daniel's, " one
like unto a son of man," who came with the clouds
of heaven and was brought near to the Ancient of
Days and given, universal and everlasting dominion
and glory and a kingdom, 2 was known to our Lord
and used by Him. But He transformed completely
the whole basis of the conception of the " Elect
One," who in Enoch is a purely celestial figure,
angelic rather than human. In our Lord's use of
the figure, he is first of all the man born of a woman
and living the human life among His fellows ; then
the suffering " Servant of Jehovah," who wins re-
demption for the many by the sacrifice of His life ;
and so only passes to resurrection and glory and
the awful dignity of the judge of the world. It is
on this basis that the note of resurrection and glory
and power is sounded in the ears of the disciples,
side by side with the note of suffering. " The third
day he shall rise again." And they are to " see the
Son of Man coming in the glory of His Father with
the holy angels." 3

This, then, is the conclusion of our enquiry. The
conception of the Messiah which Jesus caused to
grow in the minds of the disciples was profoundly
original in the sense that it took up all the elements
of ancient prophecy and recent interpretation, and

1 See Dalman, op. cit. p. 243 : "A Christian interpolator should
above all things have made it clear in some way that the Son of
Man coming in judgment was Jesus of Nazareth. But the Son of
Man in this case appears never to have been upon earth, far less
to have passed through the state of death." See, however, above
p. 31, for the title Son of Man.

Dan. vii 13-14.

3 Mark viii 31, 38, xiv 62. On the esohatological teaching of our
Lord and the question of its relation to reality see at length
pp. 135ff.

THE MESSIAHSHIP OF JESUS 67

combined them in a whole in His own person in
a whole which, while it realized their best spirit,
was quite remote from the expectations of His
contemporaries. According to Jesus' teaching, the
Messiahship had its basis in His humble and patient
manhood, and it was to have its centre in His
rejection and suffering and crucifixion, and its
vindication in His resurrection and in the mission
of His Spirit (for the resurrection of the dead and
the effusion of the Spirit were, as we have seen,
elements in the ancient prophecies of the Messianic
days), and it was to find its consummation in His
Lordship in heaven and in His coming to judge the
quick and,dead.

But in spite of the special help given to them in
the vision of the Transfiguration, the disciples had
at present no ears for the note of glory beyond
humiliation and through it. They could only attend
to the announcements of utter shame and rejection
and death. Not only did He speak to them of His
own death, but of the death of their national hopes.
He told them quite plainly that Jerusalem was
doomed, 1 and that their city and temple would be
destroyed ; and He bade them accept this utter
seeming failure, both of Him, their Master, and of
all that their patriotic hearts held dear, as some-
thing inevitable and necessary for the kingdom to
come. 2 It was too much for them. It stirred in
their minds a despondency and repulsion which
overcame even their loyalty and their faith in Him.

There is hardly any tragedy in history which
moves us more than the failure of the disciples.
But it was a temporary tragedy. Their failure
became an element in their strength and power.
Their faith in Jesus lived again, and took form and
glory after their recovery, and in the next chapter

1 On this Bee below, pp. 146ff.
Luke xxi 28.

C8 THE BELIEF OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES

we shall trace its course. What we have done so
far is to recognize that, quite apart from their ideas
about the person of Jesus their Master, which were
no doubt vague and uncertain, quite apart even
from the new conception of the Christ which Jesus
had planted in their reluctant souls to bear fruit
after their temporary failure, there was another and
deeper impression which they could not shake off.
They had been keeping company with one who,
deliberately as it seemed, had come to occupy
towards their souls a place of authority which is
practically God's place. He had come to have for them
the values of God. We can conceive nothing further
from the method of Jesus than that He should
have startled and shocked their consciences by pro-
claiming Himself as God. But He had done some-
thing which in the long run would make any other
estimate of Him hardly possible.

NOTE (to p. 45)
On the Relation of John the Baptist to Jesus

We need not dwell upon the small differences of detail
between the first three evangelists in their accounts of
the circumstances of the baptism of Jesus and His recog-
nition by John as the Christ. But the Fourth Gospel
makes a great deal of John's testimony to Jesus as the
Son of God, by which he appears to mean simply the
Christ (see i 8, 26, 32-5, iii 22-30, v 33, x 41). John
is also there represented as calling Him " the Lamb of
God which taketh away the sins of the world," thus
identifying Him with the Suffering Servant of Jehovah of
Is. liii ; and it alone records, what is very interesting,
that some five of the apostles had been previously
disciples of John and had been directed by John to Jesus,
and had in some sense become His disciples then and
there, and had acknowledged Him for the Christ (John
i 35-51), and had had some profound experiences of
Him before the end of John's ministry and their call

JOHN THE BAPTIST AND CHRIST 69

to be " fishers of men " (John ii and iii 22). I do not
think all this is at all impossible. As Dr. Holland points
out, 1 their early confession that Jesus was the Christ,
or " the Son of God, the King of Israel," was an echo of
the popular Jewish hope which their subsequent experi-
ence obliterated, so that they had to rediscover His
Messiahship in a quite new sense. Nor do I see any-
thing improbable in John having, perhaps first among
the Jews, identified the Suffering Servant with the Christ.
I think we have in these additions to the story of the
Synoptists genuine memories. See Burney, Aramaic
Origin of the Fourth Gospel, pp. 104 ff.

It is worth noticing that the record of the divine voice
at the baptism is given by all the Synoptists as " This is
my beloved son in whom I was " or "I have been well
pleased." This makes it plain that none of them regard
the Sonship as dating from the baptism, though I think
that to the consciousness of John (but not to that of
Jesus), as to the rest of the Jews, the term at that time
meant no more and no less than the Christ. This idea
of the Christ must have come from Ps. ii 7 and
Ixxxix 26.

As a result of his preaching and baptism " the disciples
of John " appear to have constituted a distinctive
fraternity, whom John bound together by special rules.
He taught them to pray and to observe special fasts,
and " on some points of ceremonial he may have had
tenets of his own " (see Luke xi 1, v 33, John iii 15 ;
cf. Acts xviii 25, xix 3-4; and see Latham's Pastor
Pastorum, p. 155). But it does not appear clearly in the
Acts how much they understood " concerning Jesus.' 1

1 In The Philosophy oj Faith and the Fourth Gospel (Murray, 1921),
pp. 172 f.

CHAPTER III

THE FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH AND OF ST. PAUL

IT would seem that all the effort of Jesus was directed,
in the latter part of His ministry, to the training of
the Twelve, and especially to the preparation of
their minds to welcome the principle of sacrifice, and
withstand the shock of the Cross. 1 Crucifixion in
the Roman provinces was an exceedingly common
punishment. The spectacle of men bearing the cross-
beam to their place of punishment would have been
familiar enough. But to the heart of the Jewish
nation it must have been the symbol of subjection
and ignominy. And to the natural heart of the
disciples the course which Jesus, whom they had
confessed to be the Christ, had, as it appeared, so
deliberately chosen, seemed doubtless an intolerable
betrayal. There was, indeed, at the last hour one
moment of seeming triumph ; for Jesus, who was so
reluctant to figure as the Son of David, because of
the false associations of royalty implied in the title,
accepted it from the blind beggar Bartimaeus on His
way to Jerusalem, and later consented to be hailed
as King by a mixed crowd, in a momentary fit of

1 Crucifixion was the ordinary Roman punishment for persons
supposed to be dangerous to the Empire, see Hastings' Diet, of
the Bible, i, p. 628. After the death of Herod the Great Josephus
(B.J. ii v 3) tells us that Varus crucified 2000 rioters at one
time, cf. ii xii 6, xiii 2, xiv 9; also (v xi 1) that, at the destruction
of Jerusalem, the crucifixions inflicted by Titus were so constant
and numerous that there was neither room for the crosses nor
wood to make them.

70

THE TRAGEDY OF THE CROSS 71

enthusiasm, at His entry into Jerusalem. 1 And if
the cleansing of the temple occurred immediately
afterwards, 2 that was another triumph, which would
have raised the spirits of the disciples. It would have
seemed for the moment as if He was now going to
assert His power. But this brief elevation of spirits
was followed by the warnings of immediate betrayal
and death, and it became plain that not all that
Jesus could do had availed at all to inspire into the
disciples' minds the acceptance of the Cross.

There is no tragedy in history more moving than
the rejection of Christ all the more that it was not
due to any extraordinary wickedness in the Jews
or the Romans, but to the ordinary motives of men.
In the Sadducean family of Annas it was due to
the selfish determination to uphold by all means
their own precarious position of authority, dignity
and wealth, under the Roman sovereignty, and to
suppress every movement that might make the
Romans jealous ; in the Pharisees, to their refusal,
at the bidding of one who was in their eyes the merest
layman, to acknowledge profound mistakes, and to
think over again from the beginning what was the
meaning of the religion of which they were the
orthodox representatives ; in the mass of the people
to their worldly preoccupation of mind and their
stubborn nationalism, which made them entertain
wild hopes, and blinded them to the spiritual " way"
of redemption which Jesus presented to them ; in
Pilate, to the refusal to do what very few Roman
governors would have dreamed of doing to prefer
abstract justice, in the case of an impotent individual,
to the apparent interests of the Empire and himself.

1 I cannot but think that St. John's explanation of the fit of
enthusiasm by the excitement due to the raising of Lazarus (xii
9-19) is the only explanation of it which makes it at the moment
intelligible. In the Synoptists taken alone it appears unaccountable.

2 St. John, however, puts it at the beginning of the ministry.
I think it is not improbable that it occurred twice.

72 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

Such refusals and obsessions are all around us every
day. They constitute the common atmosphere of
society, certainly in our own time as much as of
old. The mind of the ecclesiastical authorities, as
exhibited in Church history towards " unauthorized "
prophets, constantly recalls the Pharisees. The atti-
tude of politicians and men of business and governing
classes towards moral principles constantly recalls
the Sadducees and Pilate. The attitude of popular
movements constantly recalls " the common people "
of Jerusalem and Galilee. It is the tragedy of human
life from the point of view of the believer in God. God
comes unto His own and His own receive Him not.

And if the most tragic feature in the whole situa-
tion is the failure of the Twelve if we can hardly
bear to read the story of Peter's denial yet we must
not be scornful. The doctrine which they were
required to embrace was a very new one* contrary
always to flesh and blood, but to none so contrary
as to the Jews. It is not easy to realize the depth
of the requirement which our Lord made upon His
disciples' hearts and minds when He bade them not
only contemplate His own seeming failure and death,
but also anticipate the doom which He so solemnly
pronounced upon their nation and city and temple,
and be prepared to witness its accomplishment even
with joy, as the necessary prelude of the kingdom of
God. 1 No one, Jew or Gentile, can know his own mind
or the mind of men and women in general without
recognizing that the real strain on faith is the spectacle
of the present seeming weakness of God and of good,
which no prospect of future reversal seems able to
counterbalance. Truly God " delivers His strength
into captivity and His glory into the enemies' hands." 2

1 Luke xxi 28-31.

1 Ps. Ixxviii 61 (Bible version). The reference is to the capture
of the Ark of God. Our Prayer Book version, "their power . . .
and their beauty," is a mistake.

THE RECOVERY OF THE TWELVE 73

But a few weeks after the crucifixion and en-
tombment of Jesus, the company of " the brethren,"
numbering one hundred and twenty persons, and
centering upon the Twelve, are presented to us in the
beginning of the Acts in a wholly different frame of
mind. They are now radiant and confident, and are
prepared to face an even world-wide mission, appar-
ently of a most desperate kind, and to challenge the
world, with a clear understanding at least of the
ground of their mission. I have contended in the
volume which preceded this, 1 that nothing can satis-
factorily account for their sudden, complete and
corporate change of mind, except a certain series of
facts, some of which are recorded in detail by the
Evangelists, and which are summarized at an earlier
date by St. Paul 2 that is the rinding of the tomb
of Jesus empty on the third day, and His repeated
appearances afterwards, with a humanity strangely
changed in physical condition, but still the same
which had assured them, beyond possibility of mis-
take, of His actual resurrection from the dead. On
the fortieth day after the Resurrection St. Luke
records that these appearances came to an end with
the Ascension, 3 which after another ten days was
followed by the promised effusion of the Holy Spirit.
I do not propose to go again over the ground of the

1 Belief in God, pp. 262 ff.

8 Edward Meyer, Ursprung, pp. 11-12, writes: "The bodily
resurrection of Jesus and His numerous appearances before the
disciples belong to the oldest traditions and those that were earliest
fixed in a definite formula. Paul received this formula after his
conversion in his period of instruction (Lehrzeit), and reproduced
it in 1 Cor. xv. . . . That Paul says ' Kephas ' not * Peter '
is a proof that the formula . . . was originally composed in
Aramaic."

3 There seems to me to be no adequate ground for the assumption
of Meyer (op. cit.. vol. i. pp. 40 ff.) that the narrative of the Ascension
is an interpolation.

74 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

wt evidences " of these events having actually occurred.
Without in any way blinding ourselves to difficulties
or discrepancies of detail between our authorities
such as occur in all original testimonies by ordinary
people, unless they have been artificially rectified- I
do not think that it is possible either to reject them
or to call them doubtful. It seems to me psycho-
logically certain that such a rapid, simultaneous con-
version of such unimaginative men as we know the
Twelve to have been from the state of mind as described
in the Gospels, both before and after the crucifixion
of Jesus Christ, to the state of mind described in the
beginning of the Acts, could not have occurred except
by the impact of indisputable facts of experience,
such as those to which they attributed their newly-
won convictions.

Nor do I propose to recur to the question of the
Lucan authorship and trustworthiness of the Acts
of the Apostles. Some critics hold that in the
earlier chapters (i-xii) St. Luke is dependent upon
Aramaic documents. Dr. Burkitt has recently
suggested that St. Mark's narrative may originally
have extended over the period covered by them. 1
We can leave these questions aside as doubtful.
What we are not justified in doubting is that, in
his intercourse with Philip the Evangelist and
Mnason, the " original " disciple, and some of the
women of the apostolic company, and no doubt
others at Caesarea and at Jerusalem, and with John
Mark in Rome during St. Paul's imprisonment
there John Mark who had probably lived through

1 Earliest Sources for the Life of Jesus (Constable, 1922), p. 79.
" It may be well to remind ourselves that we do not know how far
the narrative (of Mark) extended over the ground covered by
St. Luke's Acts of the Apostles. The first half of the work ends
with the name of ' John who was surnamed Mark,' and it is plausible
to suppose it may have been in the work of Mark that the third
Evangelist came across the life-like episode of Rhoda." Certainly,
however, Papias' description of Mark's record does not suggest
this larger scope.

THE BEGINNING OF THE ACTS 75

all those early days in his mother's house at Jerusalem
where the apostolic company assembled Luke had
excellent opportunities for knowing the facts with
sufficient accuracy to enable him to write trust-
worthy history. In Rackham's Acts we have a
very careful and thoughtful study of these early
chapters. To my mind, one of the most convincing
assurances of their trustworthiness lies in the exact
account given of the nature of the early belief in
Jesus. St. Luke published his record at least not
earlier than St. Paul's release from his first captivity.
He had been St. Paul's trusted companion all through
the period when he was writing his epistles. He
must have been quite familiar with St. Paul's full
doctrine of Christ, and of justification and salvation
in the Church which is His Body. I do not indeed
see any signs that St. Luke assimilated St. Paul's
theology very deeply he was a historian with a
vivid perception of the beauties of moral character,
rather than a theologian, we should suppose ; but
he gives us touches of Paul's theology in the speeches
in the latter part of the Acts. As we shall see, it is
St. Paul who first in the record of the Acts calls
Jesus the Son of God l ; it is St. Paul who talks
about justification by faith, as distinguished from
works of the law 2 ; it is St. Paul who talks about
" the Church of God which he purchased with
his own blood." 3 The circumstances of these
speeches, as the Acts records them, do not give
much opportunity for the characteristic Pauline
theology. They consist of St. Paul's first approaches
to Jewish and Gentile hearers, and of his apologia pro
vita sua to the Jews and to the Church. But some
of his characteristic phrases are there. Whereas

1 Acts ix 20, cf. xiii 32. It is singular that in the Acts as a
whole there is actually no mention of God as Father except in
Acts~_i 4, 7 (the words of the risen Jesus) and Acts ii 33, where
Peter refers to this promise.

2 xiii 39. 3 xx 28.

76 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

in the earlier part of the Acts they are quite absent.
This is very noticeable. It indicates that St. Luke
had good authorities for the early speeches he
records and did not write at random ; thus we can
approach the first part of the Acts with reasonable
confidence to see how it represents the primitive
belief.

The disciples, as represented especially by their
leader St. Peter, 'are set before us as simply filled
with the thoughts forced upon them by the
Resurrection and later by the effusion of the Holy
Spirit. The central thought is that of the Lordship
of Jesus the Christ. Though God certified His
mission " by mighty works and wonders and signs
which God did by him in the midst of Israel," yet
Israel had crucified and slain Him by the hands of
the Romans. But now God had vindicated Him
by the Resurrection and exalted Him by His right
hand and to His right hand ; and it was He who
had poured forth the promised gift of the Holy
Spirit, which He received from the Father. >; There-
fore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that
God made him both Lord and Christ, 1 this Jesus
whom ye crucified."

So far as appears in the Acts, Peter raised no ques-
tion concerning the divine Sonship or pre-existcnce of
Jesus. 2 He is content throughout, as in his discourse
in the house of Cornelius, to speak of Him as the
man " Jesus of Nazareth, anointed with the Holy
Ghost and with power, who went about doing good,
and healing all that were oppressed with the devil ;
for God was with him." But now, risen and exalted

1 Acts ii 22-36. This must not be taken to imply that he was
not the Christ when on earth. It was as the Christ that He suffered,
iv 10.

2 We should notice that the glorified Christ is the man Jesus of
Nazareth who had lived and died on earth. There are no signs at
all of the pre-existent heavenly man-like being of the Similitudes of
Enoch.

THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS 77

to heaven, He is " Lord of all " and " ordained of
God to be the judge of quick and dead." It is in
His name, and through belief in Him, that men
must receive remission of sins and the gift of the
Holy Ghost. 1 It is in His name that miracles of
power are done. 2 There is indeed salvation in none
other : for neither is there any other name under
heaven that is given among men, wherein we must
be saved. 3 He is " the Prince " or " the Prince
of life," and the " Saviour." His is " the Name." 4
This is their summary creed Jesus is the Christ
Jesus is Lord. The one name of salvation is the
name of Jesus. Beholding Him in the moment of
martyrdom, standing as Son of Man on the right
hand of God, Stephen addresses to Him the prayer
" Lord Jesus, receive my spirit," and probably the
words following, " Lord, lay not this sin to their
charge," just as Jesus on the cross had addressed
the Father, " Father, into thy hands I commend
my spirit," " Father, forgive them." Before Pente-
cost, when the disciple who was to fill up the place
of Judas had to be chosen, they had prayed and said
' Thou, Lord, which knowest the hearts of all men,
show of these two the one whom thou hast chosen,
to take the place in this ministry and apostleship," and
it is probable 5 that the Lord Jesus just mentioned
is in that place also being appealed to, to make a
fresh choice in order to fill the vacancy in the number
of the twelve whom He had chosen when on earth.
It should be noted that " to call on the name of
Jesus," that is to invoke Him in prayer, is spoken
of (cap. ix 14, 21) as the characteristic habit of the
disciples.

Further it was " in the name of the Lord Jesus "

1 Acts x 36-43. 2 Acts iii 16.

3 Acts iv 12. Acts iii 15, v 31, 41, ix 14-16.

6 Acts i 21-4. The consideration to the contrary is that the
single Greek word for * that knoweth the hearts ' (K
used of God, i.e. the Father, in xv 8.

78 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

that men were baptized l ; and, if we accept the
account of what occurred at the Last Supper as
St. Paul declares himself to have " received " it
and as the Synoptists relate it, we must believe
that when the disciples met for " the breaking of
the bread" 2 they celebrated, according to their
Lord's institution, the sacrament of His body and
blood, and in that solemn rite acknowledged that
He who had given His body and blood in sacrifice
for them upon the Cross, and who was now alive
at the right hand of God, was also amongst them on
earth, where they were gathered together in His
name, to be their spiritual food, and to bind them
together in one. Such a rite and such an accom-
panying belief seem to imply a conception of
Christ's person beyond what, to judge from the
record of Acts, they were at present explicitly enter-
taining or proclaiming. 3

What then was " the faith in Jesus " or " in His
Name " of the first Christian community, intellec-
tually considered ? It was not, we should judge, an
explicit faith in His deity, but faith in Him as Lord. 4
" Jesus is Christ and Lord " and " He has sent down
upon us His Holy Spirit " was their summary creed.
But to believe in the universal Lordship of Jesus,
and His enthronement at God's right hand to be-
lieve that He is to judge the quick and dead that

1 Acts viii 16. I have not cited the text (Matt, xxviii 19),
" baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Ghost," because, on purely critical principles, it is difficult
to be sure of its being really a word of Christ on earth ; nor do I
discuss the question of baptism only in the name of Jesus. The
whole body of sacramental questions, with the question of the
Church and its authority, is deferred to the next volume.

* Acts ii 42.

3 On the doubts constantly being raised whether Jesus really
in fact instituted any sacrament of His body and blood for future
observance by His Church, see appended note A, p. 99.

I must not, of course, pass over the position of the critics who
constantly inform us that it is in St. Paul that we first find the
affirmation that Jesus is Lord. See appended note B, p. 102.

HOW WAS IT TO END ? 79

from Him the Spirit of God is received and in His
name sins are forgiven in baptism and wonders
done that His name is the one name of salvation
given to all men under heaven that He is to be
called upon in prayer that He is present in " the
breaking of the bread " to be the spiritual food of
His disciples all this taken together means certainly
that He had for them " the values of God." Not
indeed all the " values " of God, for they would not yet
have thought of Him, as far as we can see, as the
Creator or sustainer of the world. But with regard
to all that concerned their spiritual relations to God,
Jesus held towards them such a position as a mere
man, however highly endowed, could not have held.
How was this to be accounted for ? It was an
ambiguous moment. One can imagine an intelligent
Greek, who knew the severity of the Jewish mono-
theism, and was accustomed to constrast it with the
lax ascription of deity to eminent things or persons
in the Hellenic or Roman world, watching the Chris-
tians in Jerusalem with interest, and taking note
that these Jews were apparently abandoning what
he had always regarded as their chief religious
stronghold their stubborn belief in one only God
and their stubborn refusal to worship any other
being. What was to be the end of it ?

II

It was not to end in any weakening of Mono-
theism. Among the fiercest of their Jewish enemies
was one who, converted to faith in Jesus, was to show
them how to conciliate their old faith in the One
God with their newly born faith in the Lordship of
Jesus.

I do not think it is an accident that St. Paul is
said by St. Luke, at the first moment after his

80 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

conversion to have proclaimed " Jesus that he is the
Son of God." l Nor is it without serious meaning
that St. Paul describes his own conversion as the
revelation within him of Jesus as " God's son "
" to reveal his Son in me that I might preach him
among the Gentiles." 2 That was the term, so
solemnly used by Jesus of Himself, in which St.
Paul saw the secret of His person. No doubt from
the date of his conversion his soul went out in
passionate faith toward Jesus as the glorified Christ
and as the Lord. But he was, what no one of the
earlier apostles had been, a man who had received the
highest training of the Jewish schools " at the feet
of " the renowned Rabbi Gamaliel, and we should
judge from his Epistles that he was not only a Jewish
theologian but also had imbibed at his native city
of Tarsus something of the philosophical spirit for
which it was famous. He could not be content to
worship Jesus as Lord without understanding why
such worship could be given Him, and how it was
to be reconciled with the strict faith in one only
God, one only object of worship, which retained his
whole-hearted loyalty to the end.

He had the opportunity after his conversion of
thinking out his position. After his first " act of
reparation " at Damascus when, with all possible
courage and at the greatest risk, he proclaimed his
new faith " that Jesus is the Son of God " and " con-
founded the Jews that, dwell at Damascus, proving
that this is the Christ," he was hurried secretly out
of the city and passed probably some years in Arabia.
Then, three years after his conversion, he paid a brief
visit to Jerusalem, where again " he preached boldly
in the name of the Lord," but again was in risk of

1 It must be remembered that Acts viii 37 (the only previous
mention of " the Son of God " in our old version of Actd) is
probably not part of the true text.

* Gal. i 1C ; cf. ii 20.

THE INTERVENTION OF PAUL 81

his life from the hostility of the Jews, and was sent
off to his old home, Tarsus, out of harm's way, and
must have been there perhaps some seven years.
But we hear little or nothing of any evangelistic
work there. 1 It is probable that his sojourn both in
Arabia and in Tarsus was on the whole a time of
retirement and thought. From the time when
Barnabas fetched him to Antioch, his life must have
been one of ceaseless strain. But before that he had
had time to think out the meaning of his new faith,
of which he had already, at Damascus and especially
at Jerusalem, received "the tradition," 2 and he had
found in the doctrine of the divine sonship the way
of reconciliation between his old Monotheism and
his new belief in the Lordship of Jesus. 3

But before we enquire into the sources of St.
Paul's doctrine of Christ's person, we must have it
clearly before our mind, and we should take notice
that the way in which it is referred to in his epistles
seems to show conclusively that, in its main lines.,
it must have formed part of his first preaching

1 He speaks (Gal. i 21) of going "into the region of Syria and
Cilicia," and of the Christians in Judaea hearing " that he that
once persecuted them now preached the faith of which he once
made havoc." We hear of " brethren in Syria and Cilicia," and
at the beginning of the second missionary journey " he went through
Syria and Cilicia confirming the churches " (Acts xv 23, 41).
But if these churches were of his foundation we should have been
likely to hear something of them. And we hear nothing.

* He tells us himself that he received the tradition concerning
the Resurrection (1 Cor. xv 1-3) and concerning the institution
of the Eucharist (probably there was more that he does not
mention). Galatians i 17, ii 6 must be read in the light of these
disclosures.

3 I am glad to see that Eduard Meyer, Ursprung, vol. ii, p. 348,
recognizes the importance, not only of " the tradition " which
St. Paul received in Damascus and Jerusalem, but also of the
long period of subsequent reflection before he began his mission
work : "In der langen Zeit, die er nach seiner Bekehrang in
Damascus und Tarsus zubrachte, muss er iiber die neue Erkenntnis
gegriibelt haben, die ihm aufgegangen war, bis er mit seiner
Anschauungen in reinen war und sie sich in seiner Weise logisch
zurecht gelegt hatte, so dass er alsdann die Missionstatigkeit
beginnen konnte."

LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE

82 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

when founding his churches, for it is not introduced
anywhere in his writings as if it were a new
thing.

He is full of the familiar thought of the Lordship
of Christ, and indeed occasionally the Lord (Jehovah)
and the Lord (Christ) are unmistakably identified
that is, Old Testament language about the former
is applied to the latter. 1 But St. Paul has what
the Church before him apparently had not an
explanation. Christ can be thus treated as divine
Lord, or identified with Jehovah, because before
He was sent into the world He was with the Father
as His Son " his own son " (Rom. viii 3), " the son
of his love " (Col. i 13). The glorified Christ can
be the very "image of God " 2 because, at the be-
ginning of things, as Son of the Father, He had been
God's "image" the expression of the invisible
God. 3 Through Him, the Son, has God done
whatever in the process of creation He has done.
He is " the heir of all creation " " through him
are all things " " in him were all things created,
in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and
things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or
principalities or powers ; all things have been created
through him, and unto him (he is their end) ; and
he is (or ' he exists ') before all things, and in him
all things have their coherence." He is not only
the creator of all that is, but also the continuous,
immanent principle of order in the universe. 4 It
is He who was supplying the need of the Israelites
in the wilderness as " the rock that followed

1 See Romans x 9-15 (Joel ii 32) ; 2 These, i 9 (Is. ii 10, 19,
21) ; 1 Cor. ii 16 (Is. xl 13, Ixx) ; 1 Cor. x 21 (Mai. i 7, 12).
This identification has been described as " not proven " in any
case in the N.T. But it seems to me beyond dispute. See Sanday
and Headlam on Rom. x.

2 Cor. iv 4. a Col. i 15.

4 See I Cor. viii 6 ; Col. i 15-17. Nothing can better Lightfoot's
notes on this passage.

HIS DOCTRINE OF CHRIST 83

them." 1 He it was who "when the fulness of the
time was come " was sent forth " born of a woman,
born under the law," " in the likeness of the flesh
of sin," but " knowing no sin," 2 as man to redeem
mankind, whether Jews or Gentiles, who will believe
on Him. He was, as man on earth, their example,
and their propitiation before God, and now He is
continuously from heaven the source of their new
life by His spirit. For that divine Sonship which
was veiled during His mortal life and in His death,
was declared again unmistakably in His resurrec-
tion 3 ; and thereupon, being exalted to the heavenly
places, He communicates His own Spirit, which is
the Spirit of God, to the Church, which is His body,
and to all its members, so that " in Him " they may
live as sons in His sonship, and by Him be renewed
into His image, and remaining in Him, 4 whether
they live or die, may be prepared to meet Him when
He comes in glory, being already associated with
Him in the life of God.

This is St. Paul's doctrine of Christ in summary.
I think Dr. Allan Menzies (commenting on 2 Cor. iv
4) is right in saying " It was difficult for them
(Jews) to take in how one who had been a man on
the earth could be [a] God, and if this was not
accepted, all the other Pauline doctrines remained
incredible, a tangle of paradoxes and indiscretions.
The verse shows very clearly how the whole of Paul's
thought hinged on his doctrine of Christ's divinity."

St. Paul is not a scientific writer who exhibits
his thought accurately and consecutively stated.
If he had been this, he would have saved the

1 1 Cor. x 4. In this connection I am inclined to believe that
the A.V. of verse 9 gives the right reading : " Neither let us tempt
Christ, as some of them also tempted."

8 See Rom. viii 3, Gal. iv 4, 2 Cor. v 21.

3 Rom. i 3-4.

4 " In the Lord," or " in Christ," or " in Christ Jesus," or " i
the Lord Jesus."

84 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

controversial and critical world a great deal of
trouble, but he would not have been St. Paul. He
does, however, incidentally give us what it is
hardly an exaggeration to call a careful theory of
the meaning of the Incarnation in the Epistle to
the Philippians, though the theory as given is only
incidental to an ethical exhortation. His theme
is humility, and his example of humility is Christ,
not only withia the compass of His human life but
before that in the act of taking humanity. For
" pre-existing in the characteristics [or nature]
of God, he set no store on equality with God, but
emptied himself, taking the characteristics [or
nature] of a servant, and being made in the likeness
of men ; and being found in fashion as a man, he
humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto
death, yea, the death of the cross. Wherefore also
God highly exalted him, and bestowed upon him
the name which is above every name ; that at
the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things
in heaven and things on earth and things under the
earth, and that every tongue should confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." l

1 Phil, ii 5-11. This is one of the passages in the N.T. which
have been obscured by excessively minute scrutiny. I do not
think anything can better Lightfoot's commentary. Some people
are disposed to dispute that " emptied himself " or " annulled him-
self " is meant as a description of the act of the Incarnation at
all. They would apparently translate " he emptied himself,
having taken," i.e. He first took human nature and then humbled
Himself. But " emptied himself " here is surely parallel to
" beggared himself " or " made himself poor " in 2 Cor. viii 9.
Both phrases describe an act of abandonment by our Lord of the
state belonging to His divine nature which was involved in becoming
man. " Emptied himself " is therefore to be distinguished from
the " humbled himself " which follows in Phil, ii 7, and which
describes His conduct after He became man. See Menzies on
2 Cor. viii 9. " With the phrase ' chose poverty' [or * made himself
poor '] we may compare ' he emptied himself ' (Phil, ii), which
refers not to the act of Jesus as a man, but to the great act of
humiliation He performed when He gave up His existence in the
form of God, and took on Himself the form of a servant."

The word translated ''characteristics" (or "nature," which I

HIS CO-ORDINATION WITH GOD 85

This being St. Paul's doctrine of a real incarnation
of the Son of God, who pre-existed in the essential
characteristics or nature of God, we ask whether
St. Paul believes Him to have been, and calls Him
without qualification, God. What everywhere con-
fronts us in St. Paul's letters is that he attributes
to Him always in definite subordination to God,
the Father 1 all the characteristic functions of
God ; the creation of all things in the universe and
the maintenance of creation, as we have seen ; the
providence which directs the accidents of life; the
" grace " that redeems men and holds them " in
Christ " or "in the Lord " as the sphere in which
they live ; the final judgment which is unerringly
to assess each human life ; the crowning of the re-
deemed with glory and the consummation of the
whole creation. 2 In the whole range of divine
activities there appears to be no district in which

think is a better word) is literally " form " ; but the English word
is misleading. The original word describes the " permanent
characteristics " or " kind " or " manner of being " of anything.
See Lightfoot in loc. and Trench, Synonyms, pp. 247 ff. So the
" form of the servant " describes the permanent characteristics
or " nature " of manhood with probable reference to the " servant
of Jehovah " in Second Isaiah. The words " likeness " and "fashion "
which follow affirm that the Son of God not only took the real
nature but also the outward appearance and condition of manhood.
The Son not only became really man, but ordinary man, like other
men to look at, and like other men in all the changing conditions
of life.

1 Alike in (a) His cosmic activities, and (6) in His redemptive
activities the Son is subordinate to the Father ; see for (a)
1 Cor. viii 6, Col. i 15, and for (6) Gal. iv 4, Col. i 19, 1 Cor. xi 3.
It is not necessary to multiply quotations. And the essential
subordination of the Son to the Father, as recipient to source,
has always been the Catholic doctrine. See Westcott on
John xiv 28. In 1 Cor. xv 28 St. Paul speaks of the ultimate
order, when the work of the mediatorial Kingdom of Christ is fully
accomplished, and all resistance and rebellion is over for ever, and
in that ultimate order the Son is subordinate to the Father.

2 It is not necessary to multiply quotations, but see Col. i 14-18,
1 Thess. iii 11, 2 Cor. xiii 14, and Gal. i 3, 2 Cor. v 17, 2 Cor.
v 10, Rom. vi 23, 2 Thess. ii 14, Phil, iii 21, ii 10, Eph.
i 10.

86 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

God, that is the Father, is not associated with His
Son, nor is it in St. Paul's mind apparently con-
ceivable that the honour paid to the Son, the Lord
Jesus, throughout the whole created universe, should
be any derogation from or should be distinguishable
from the honour paid to the Father, or that there
should be anything given to the Father in the way
of homage by His creatures which is withheld from
the Son. On the whole the instinct of monotheism
(and no doubt the pressing necessity to maintain
the language of monotheism in churches of Gentile
origin) leads St. Paul generally to speak of the Father
alone as God and of the Son as Lord : " For us
there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things,
and we unto him ; and one Lord, Jesus Christ,
through whom are all things, and we through him "
(1 Cor. viii 6) ; but so completely is the Son repre-
sented as sharing in the divine life and activity that
it is, I think, wilful to question the ascription to
the Christ, who was born of Jewish stock " as con-
cerning the flesh," of the words which seem so
plainly to suggest the antithesis of the glory of
Christ to His humiliation " who is over all, God
blessed for ever " 1 or to question the phrase in
St. Paul's speech at Miletus to the Ephesian elders,
" the Church of God which he purchased with his own
blood," or "the blood which is his own." 2 We
should conclude, then, that as St. Paul constantly
associates the Lord (Jesus) in all the strictly divine
activity and glory, so occasionally he calls Him
God.

We know that St. Paul would have attributed

1 Rom. ix 5. See Sanday and Headlam in loc.

9 Acts xx 28. In this phrase I think with Rackham God means
the Father, but the blood of Christ is called "his own." In
Titus ii 13, however, I think Parry, following Hort, is probably
right in treating the words " Jesus Christ " as in apposition to
" the glory of our great God and Saviour." Christ, that is, is
" the glory of God " (see below, pp. 128 ff).

THE SOURCES OF ST. PAUL'S DOCTRINE 87

his doctrine of Christ to direct divine inspiration. 1
Just as our Lord would have St. Peter assured
that his confession of His Messiahship was due to
nothing lower than divine revelation, so would St.
Paul have felt and claimed for his fuller conviction
about Christ's person. But in neither case can
divine revelation be taken to exclude human and
external influences. Whence, then, we ask, did St.
Paul derive, not his conviction, but the materials
through which this conviction expressed itself ?

It has been commonly suggested by those who
are absorbed in the new study of " apocalyptic "
that St. Paul's idea of the pre-existent Christ is
derived from the Similitudes of the Book of Enoch
or from similar sources which have perished. But
this suggestion ought to be abandoned. The figure
in the Similitudes is that of a quasi-angelic being in
human form, who is being preserved in the secret
treasury of God to be manifested only at the end of
the world to carry out the Divine judgment and to
usher in the world to come. If in the original docu-
ment he is called " the son of man " (which I hold
to be very doubtful), yet in no real sense has he ever
been man, nor ever will be that is, not in the sense
of sharing the nature or experience, physical and
spiritual, of the sons of men. It is a fundamentally
" docetic " figure that of these Similitudes neither
in any real sense divine nor in any real sense human.
St. Paul shows, I think, not the slightest trace of such
a presentation. He never speaks of the "Son of
Man " ; and the pre-existent " Son of God " of St. Paul
is divine, subsisting in the " form " of God, and not
yet in any sense human ; but at a definite moment in
time, by a definite human birth of a woman, He be-
came man. It was not that He appeared merely in
human guise, but that He really became man, in the
solidity of human flesh and reality of human character,

1 Gal. i 12, 15, 16.

88 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

and as man lived, and was crucified and died, and was
buried, and rose again and was glorified, and is
" to come." 1 Nor is there any reason to think that
St. Paul was influenced by Philo's hazy conception
of the ideal man who exists among the ideas of the
eternal world, 2 nor by any ancient myth of an eternal
man. There is no trace in St. Paul of any " eternal
man " at all. The only phrase pleaded on behalf
of such a suggestion is the phrase " the second man
is from heaven." In its context, I think, this phrase
can only describe the coming of Christ in glory, not
His first appearance on earth. 3 The Apostle is
answering the question " with what manner of body
do they [the dead] come," that is, at the resurrection
day. And he answers that they will come in a
spiritual body, like to Christ who has now become
" life-giving spirit," and will come as the " second
man from heaven." St. Paul was, in fact, not
enunciating any old theory which he might be
supposed to have learned as a Pharisee, but some-
thing which the resurrection of Christ (and his vision
of the risen Christ) had taught him for the j first
time. 4

To recur, then, to the question whence St. Paul
derived the material for this conception of Christ :
I think the answer must be in the first place that

1 See for St. Paul's doctrine Phil, ii 6-10, Gal. iv 4. This
verse in Galatians with Rom. i 3 implies the reality of His human
flesh ; when St. Paul talks of His character as obedient, meek and
gentle, he implies His full spiritual humanity. As He had the
" form " of God, so He took the "form," that is, the real nature,
of man. St. Paul was not confronted with any docetism. But
there is no reason to think he would have made any terms with it.
Christ in glory is still human and His " body of glory " is the pattern
of the body of glory which we are all destined to enjoy, Phil, iii 21.
On 2 Cor. v 16, " Christ after the flesh," see appended Note C, p. 105.

2 See Lebreton, Originea, p. 216.

3 1 Cor. xv 47. See Robertson and Plummer, in loc. (Internat.
Crit. Comm.). Also Dalman, op. cit., pp. 251 f.

4 On what has just been said, I must refer back for confirmation
to the Note on pp. 30 ff.

THE WORDS OF CHRIST 89

he was much better acquainted than some people
appear to suppose with the words of Christ. We
must recognize, as has been already argued, that
St. Paul, after his conversion, received " a tradition "
which in certain respects was already formulated.
I think this tradition probably included a record of
the sayings of Christ. But whether this be so or
no, we are bound to acknowledge that St. Paul
had in his mind, if not in his hand, some record
of the words of Christ, and assumes that the converts
knew it also for four times he refers to a particular
" word of the Lord " as of final and decisive authority. 1
I think also St. Paul's ethical teaching shows un-
mistakable and close familiarity with Christ's teach-
ing. His estimate of the law of love, and his descrip-
tion of love, and of " the fruits of the spirit," and
his appeal to " the meekness and gentleness of Christ,"
and to His example of humility, will, if we meditate
on them, convince us of this. 2 In the same way I
think the remarkable phrase which occurs five times
in St. Paul's epistles, " The Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ," 3 and which is used side by side with phrases
such as " our Father " or " the Father," means
that St. Paul knew how it had been our Lord's
habit to speak to His disciples never of " our
Father," 4 but of " your Father," and " my Father."
16 The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ " then, as
St. Paul uses it, means Him whom Jesus Christ
used constantly to speak of as " my Father." And if
he knew how Jesus spoke of God as His Father,
he must have known that He spoke of Himself as
the Son. Thus I have grown to feel convinced

1 1 Cor. vii 10, ix 14, 1 Thess. iv 15, Acts xx 35. In the last
two cases the " words of the Lord " have not been otherwise
preserved. In the first two they have. See also 1 Tim. vi 3.

2 So Dr. Rashdall, The Idea of Atonement, pp. 106 ff.
8 Rom. xv 6, 2 Cor. i 3, xi 31, Eph. i 3, Col. i 3.

"Our Father" (in the Lord's Prayer) is only put into the
lips of the disciples.

90 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

that St. Paul must have had in his mind, and very
possibly in written form before his eyes, such words
as "I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and
earth, that thou didst hide these things from the
wise and understanding, and didst reveal them unto
babes ; yea, Father, for so it was well pleasing in
thy sight. 1 All things have been delivered unto
me of my Father : and no one knoweth the Son,
save the Father : neither doth any know the Father
save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth
to reveal him," and " Of that day and that hour
knoweth no one, not even the^angels of heaven,
neither the Son," and again the parable of the
Husbandmen, suggesting so sharp a distinction be-
tween the servants of God (the prophets) and the
only Son. Though, as I have said, the note of the
divine sonship of Christ was absent apparently from
the first Apostolic preaching, it is very difficult
to doubt that there was thought and talk about such
memorable sayings as these in their bearing on the
mystery of Christ's person. And St. Paul was more
quick than others to catch their full meaning.

Moreover it is plain that St. Paul's doctrine of
the pre-existence of the Son, before the world was,
and His co-operation with the Father in all His
works, and His incarnation in the fulness of time,
did not in any way shock or surprise the Church.
There were, we know, aspects and elements in
St. Paul's teaching which excited alarm and caused
dissension. This is much more evident in St. Paul's
own Epistles than in the Acts. But there is no such
note of emphasis on his teaching about the person
of Christ as to suggest that it was surprising by
its novelty or calculated to raise antagonism. It is
taken for granted as an accepted truth. And this
could not have been the case if the idea of Jesus

1 I suspect that 1 Cor. i 18 f. is reminiscent of the context of
these words : "I thank thee, Father," etc.

CHRIST'S LORDSHIP IN NATURE 91

as Son of God, in a unique and pre-eminent sense,
had not been in the tradition of the first Jerusalem
Church, though for the time it appears to have
been almost ignored, while attention was wholly
concentrated upon His Messiahship and Lordship.
Those who believe, as I do, that the author of the
Fourth Gospel gives us real memorials of Jesus,
and is no other than John the son of Zebedee, will
remember that he was at Jerusalem at least during
the earlier stages of St. Paul's career as an Apostle,
and that St. Paul had converse with him as one of
the " pillars." It is universally assumed that St. Paul
influenced the author of the Johannine writings.
I cannot help thinking it is possible that St. John
may have communicated something to St. Paul.

I should not, of course, wish to lay any stress on
this possibility. But I do wish to lay stress on
the fact that St. Paul's doctrine of the Son of God
seems to have caused no surprise or opposition ;
and this could hardly have been the case unless it had
been already present in germ in the tradition of the
Church, though it was not apparently much in evi-
dence, while the whole attention of the Church was
preoccupied with something else.

There is nothing in the Synoptists which very
directly suggests the association of the Son in the
activities of creation or of nature, though there is
one saying in the Fourth Gospel which probably does
suggest it 1 : "My Father worketh hitherto and
I work." But as soon as ever the idea of the Son,
as associated with the Father in His eternal life,
had presented itself to St. Paul's mind, it would
probably have clothed itself in the associations of the
Wisdom of God as that is presented in the Book of
Proverbs and especially in the Wisdom of Solomon,
with which St. Paul in the Romans shows himself
well acquainted. 2

1 John v 17-20. 2 See Sanday and Headlam, p. 51.

92 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

The divine " Wisdom " in these books is not
conceived of as really a person, but it is strikingly
personified. It is represented as if it had separate
existence as God's effulgence or self-expression, before
ever the world was ; and (perhaps in Proverbs,
certainly in the Book of Wisdom) as His agent in
creation and in His self-revelation to men. Much
of the language that St. Paul uses about the activity
of the Son in tfce creation and sustentation of the
world is paralleled in this literature. " The Lord
possessed me (or ' formed me ') as the beginning of
his way, before his works of old. I was set up from
everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth
was. . . . Then I was by him as a master work-
man (?) f and I was daily his delight, rejoicing
always before him ; rejoicing in his habitable earth ;
and my delight was with the sons of men." * And
in the Book of Wisdom, Wisdom is called " the
artificer of all things . . . Yea she pervadeth and
penetrateth all things. . . . She is an effulgence
from everlasting light ; and an unspotted mirror of
the working of God, and an image of his goodness.
And she, being one, hath power to do all things ;
and remaining in herself, reneweth all things : and
from generation to generation passing into holy
souls, she maketh men friends of God and prophets."
" She reacheth from one end of the world to the other
with full strength, and order eth all things graciously."
And Solomon prays, " Give me wisdom, her that
sitteth by thee on thy throne ; . . . send her forth
from thy holy heaven, and from the throne of thy
glory bid her come." 2

There can be no doubt that at least the Book of
Wisdom exhibits the influence of Greek philosophy.
The intellectual world, under the influence of
Platonists and Stoics, was full of the conception of
a divine Reason, immanent in the universe as its
1 Prov. viii 22-30. 2 Wisd. vii 22 to ix 18.

THE DOCTRINE OF THE DIVINE WISDOM 93

order and law, and the source of the reason of man.
St. Paul's own city Tarsus, where he was brought up,
and to which he returned for a good many years
after his conversion, was pre-eminently a philosophic
city. 1 I do not suppose that St. Paul was a member
of any of the philosophic schools. But I think it
is impossible he can have been ignorant of the
philosophical ideas which constituted the common
intellectual atmosphere of educated men in his own
city. And when we read such phrases as "in him
(the Son) all things consist " or " in him we live and
move and have our being," we cannot dissociate
such an idea of an immanent God from the influences
of current philosophy, or doubt that in St. Paul's
mind this current conception of a pervading reason
helped him to frame his conception of the activities
of the Son of God in nature.

Nevertheless the influence of philosophy, or even
of the Book of Wisdom, on St. Paul must not be
exaggerated. St. Paul's attitude towards philosophy
is not sympathetic or at all trustful. He delivers his
solemn affirmations about Christ wholly as a revela-
tion of God. As I have said, I believe him to have
found in Christ's own words the source of his doctrine
of His divine sonship, He may have found there
also a foundation for his doctrine of the co-operation
of the Son with the Father in the creation and main-
tenance of nature. But as regards both doctrines,
or, to speak more properly, both parts of the same
doctrine, we shall note that the authors of the Epistle
to the Hebrews and the Fourth Gospel are entirely
at one with St. Paul. They all use the same language

1 See Strabo, xiv 5, 13 : " The zeal of its inhabitants for philo-
sophy and general culture is such that they have surpassed even
Athens and Alexandria and all other cities where schools of
philosophy can be mentioned. And its pre-eminence in this
respect is so great, because there the students are all townspeople
and foreign students do not readily settle there." Strabo was an
older contemporary of St. Paul.

94 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

about the functions of the Son in nature. They
reflect, no doubt, the language of the later Jewish
theology about the Wisdom or Word of God. But
the principle of such language is a fundamental
principle of Old Testament religion. It is the refusal
to separate the spiritual from the material, or God's
work in men's souls from His w r ork in nature. It
would have seemed self-evident to a Jew that if the
Son is the organ -of God's revelation and communica-
tion of Himself to men's souls, He must also and
equally be the organ of His work in creating and
ordering nature. And in this principle we must
surely see a real inspiration of the Spirit of truth.

Ill

Next, the Epistle to the Hebrews must claim our
attention. Nothing can bring more clearly before
our minds the novelty of literary criticism considered
as a science than the fact that for so many centuries
this Epistle should have been held to be by St.
Paul. For though the ultimate theology is closely
similar to St. Paul's, the tone of thought, as well
as the phraseology 1 and style, is characteristically
different. Who wrote this Epistle we do not know,
but we are, I think, safe in saying that it was written
for Jews and before, but not much before, the
destruction of Jerusalem, and that it was written
by one whose thought suggests Alexandria as his
spiritual home.

1 Thus God is scarcely called the " Father " ; the idea of our
being " in Christ Jesus " or "in the Lord " is absent ; the doctrine
of the Spirit is very slightly touched. There is (strangely) no
assertion of the universalism of the Gospel. The antitheses " law "
and " grace," " faith " and " works," " flesh " and " spirit " are
not to be found. It is not certain that the author was acquainted
with Philo's writings, but he certainly breathed in their atmosphere.
For instance, for him heaven is the world of spiritual and intel-
lectual realities and earth the world of shadows and images. People
who say that for the early Christians heaven was definitely a place
above our heads seem to forget the Epistle to the Hebrews.

THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 95

It has one dominant purpose, that is to present
to thoughtful Jewish converts, who were in danger
of relapsing, the essential superiority of Christianity
to the religion of the Old Testament and its finality,
on the ground of its providing for men, through
Christ, perfect and unhindered approach to God.
That is to say, in other words, that its subject is the
high-priesthood of Christ. But though this special
doctrine of the Epistle is a fascinating subject, we
are not at present directly concerned with it. What
we are concerned with is simply the author's doctrine
of the person of Christ, and this we shall find is
almost identical with St. Paul's.

" Jesus," then, (for the writer most often used
this purely human name,) had not the beginning of
His personal existence when He took flesh. Before
all creation He was the effulgence of God's glory and
the very image of His substance. 1 These phrases
suggest coeternity with God, but not directly person-
ality. But they are coupled with the personal
words " the son," and the " heir of all things " ;
and (as with St. Paul) it is the Son through whom
God made the worlds, and it is He who bears along
or upholds all things by the utterance of His power.
As Son of the Father He builds the house of which
Moses is the servant. 2 Again, as with St. Paul,
all His activity in redemption is seen upon the back-
ground of His functions in the whole of nature. He
is " God's Son, whom he appointed heir of all things,
through whom also he made the worlds ; who,
being the effulgence of his glory, and the very image
of his substance, and upholding all things by the
word of his power, when he had made purification
of sins, sat down on the right hand of the majesty
on high." 3 But though there is thus unmistakable
continuity of personal being and action between
these different " moments " of the Son's life, yet
1 i 2-4. * iii 1-6. a j 2-4.

9G FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

there is no idea of any eternal manhood. He became
man at a particular date. Thus He who had been
so much above the angels was " made a little lower
than the angels." l " He partook of flesh and
blood." 2 " He taketh hold of the seed of Abra-
ham." 3 " He sprang out of Judah." 4 And great
emphasis is laid on the reality of His manhood in
spirit as well as flesh. " He was in all points tempted
like as we are, yet without sin." 5 " In that he
himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to
succour them that are tempted." 6 " Who in the
days of his flesh, having offered up prayers and suppli-
cations with strong crying and tears unto him that
was able to save him from death, and having been
heard for his godly fear, though he was a Son, yet
learned obedience by the things that he suffered ;
and having been made perfect, he became unto all
them that obey him the author of eternal salvation." 7
His priesthood for men depends upon the reality
of His manhood and human development : and it
is in the perfection of His manhood that " he sat
down on the right hand of God." 8

Thus as He is properly divine, so He is properly
human : but His personality is divine throughout
He is the eternal Son. That in which He offers
Himself is " eternal spirit." 9 Whether, in the
quotation from Ps. xlv, 10 He is called " God " is not
certain ; but the words of Ps. cii, which describe
the activity of the Lord (Jehovah) and His un-
changeableness and eternity, are certainly ascribed
to Jesus, 11 and apparently to Him is ascribed " the
glory for ever and ever." 12 Certainly in this Epistle
there is the full doctrine of the Incarnation, quite
explicit.

1 ii 9. 8 ii 14. 3 ii 16. * vii 14.

* iv 15. 6 ii 18. 7 v 7-9. 8 x 12.

ix 14. 10 i 8. Westcott translates " God is thy throne."
" i 10. 12 xiii 21.

THE HEBREWS AND PHILO 97

But before leaving this Epistle I should wish to
emphasize its relative independence not only side
by side with St. Paul's Epistles, but also side by side
with Philo.

No doubt the author's intellectual equipment
and outlook are those of Alexandrian Judaism, but
the special value of his testimony to the doctrine
of the Incarnation lies in this that whereas the
ideology of Philo and of other like Jewish thinkers
would have come naturally to him, as a matter of
fact his Christianity his faith in Jesus had given
to all the current of ideas represented by Philo a
wholly changed basis and tendency. He believed
in the man Jesus : he clung with intense conviction
and appreciation to His human sufferings of body
and mind. The object on which his mind rested was,
not an idea, but a person of flesh and blood, who has
lived and struggled and suffered among the ordinary
children of men. It is this strongly held historical
basis of his faith which so deeply differentiates it
from the ideology of Philo. It is not that he has
transmuted the faith of the first disciples into some-
thing different by the use of Alexandrian ideas. It
is that the first faith in Jesus, the actual historical
person, accepted as what He declared Himself to be,
the Son of God, has found in the Alexandrian tradi-
tion of Judaism ideas and terms in which it can
express itself. This is to say that, by the side of St.
Paul, the writer to the Hebrews stands with a very
substantial originality, and with a very independent
grasp upon the facts concerning Jesus; but, by the
side of Philo, he stands on a different basis, and is
travelling by a different road to a different goal.

I will leave to another chapter the rest of the
New Testament books. But I feel that we have
already traversed together I and my readers
the most important and the most difficult part of
our road. The task on which we set out was to

98 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

follow along the process by which the faith in Jesus
of the first disciples developed into a clear belief
in His person.

We watched how, unconsciously, the overmaster-
ing sense of authority resident and active in Him
brought them into an attitude towards Him which
cannot be otherwise described than that He came to
have for them " the values of God." We saw too
that Jesus Himse4f seems to have deliberately minis-
tered to this result. Then we watched their failure of
faith over the scandal of the cross and their recovery
in the light of the Resurrection. Again we saw how
their crucified Master, now raised to be the Lord of
all at God's right hand, comes to have, in even fuller
sense than before, the values of God for them. We
cannot doubt that there must have been deep ques-
tioning in their souls and probably in their conver-
sation as to the secret of His person and how the Man
could be thus exalted to the place of God. But we
catch no word about the divine Sonship in their public
preaching. It is St. Paul who, as far as our records
go, first appears to have brought the idea of the Son-
ship, grounded so securely in Christ's own language,
to explain the divine exaltation of the Man and to
give the Church the formula for its creed ; but we
have seen that the Church and its teachers, as
far as St. Paul's Epistles and other documents of
the New Testament 1 enable us to judge, appear to
have accepted this doctrine about eternal Sonship
and incarnation without controversy or demurrer.
We have seen the same doctrine a few years after
St. Paul's death unhesitatingly affirmed in the
Epistle of a man equal to St. Paul in intellectual
equipment, though independent of him in training
and in the character of his mind. W T hat we have
still to ask ourselves is whether this process in the
disciples' minds, so far as we have followed it, is

1 See below on the Epistles of Peter, James and Jude, pp. 12y ff.

THE INSTITUTION OF THE EUCHARIST 99

for us really imaginable unless we suppose that the
leading under which they were moving forward was
the leading of God, and the conviction about Jesus
to which they were led was the truth. But to that
question we shall return, when we have considered
the other documents of the New Testament.

NOTE A

On the doubts raised whether Jesus in fact instituted the
Sacrament of His Body and Blood for the observance of
His Church.

Bousset and the critics of his school maintain that
the sacramental ideas and rites of St. Paul in particular
those connected with the Eucharist were not derived
from Jesus or from the early Jerusalem church, but had
their origin in the Hellenistic churches of Syria, where
sacramentalism was developed among the Christians
under the influence of the Pagan mystery religions with
which they had been familiar before their conversion.
What St. Paul did was, with the help of a vision, recorded
in 1 Cor. xi 23 ff.. to formulate and give consistency to
the sacramental principle on the basis of the Jew's belief
in God and the newly- won belief in Jesus as " the Lord "
and as " the Spirit." This theory must wait for fuller
consideration till the next volume. But before Bousset
wrote, and more widely than his influence has spread, it
has been the custom (see Inge's Outspoken Essays (1919),
pp. 227 f. and 249) among many critics to maintain
that Jesus instituted no sacraments as He founded no
church. Doubtless He celebrated a fraternal meal with
His disciples before His Passion, which had a spiritual
significance, as He was probably accustomed to do.
But He instituted no rite for any future church, such as
is implied in the words " Do this in remembrance of
me " (1 Cor. xi 24, 25). The suggestion of these critics
is that when St. Paul speaks of himself as having
" received from the Lord " and " delivered to you "
(1 Cor. xi 23) the account of the institution of such
a rite at the Last Supper, with the solemn injunction

100 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

" Do this in remembrance of me," he means that he had
received it in a vision from Jesus. This vision did not
correspond at all closely to the historical reality, but
its teaching and the practice based upon it spread rapidly
through the churches. So that when the Synoptic Gospels
were written it had become the accepted institution in
all the churches and was related in the Gospels as history.

This theory seems to me to be in manifold ways
arbitrary and improbable. For (1) St. Paul speaks also of
having " received'" and " delivered " the record of the
Resurrection in 1 Cor. xv 2-4, and no one can reasonably
doubt that he is there referring to the tradition of the
Church (see verse 11). It is obvious, therefore, to inter-
pret his words about the "tradition" of the Eucharist
in the same sense (see Dr. Anderson Scott in Cambridge
Biblical Essays, p. 337). It was " from the Lord " as
its source, though through the Church, that St. Paul
received it.

(2) If he had received it in a vision surely its form would
have been different. It would hardly have come as an
historical record. See Stanton, The Gospels as Historical
Documents, vol. iii. pp. 273 ff. : "A passage earlier in
the Epistle, where the apostle is interpreting [the sacra-
ment] will suggest that Jesus [in the vision of Paul]
might have said ' The bread which ye break is a com-
munion in my body the cup which ye partake is a
communion in my blood.' ' Nothing can read less like
a vision than St. Paul's actual narrative. 1 Or if such a
vision had been seen or imagined by St. Paul, which
did not correspond to the facts as they had been hitherto
received or to the practice of the churches already

1 Eduard Meyer, Ursprung, vol. i. p. 175, is very emphatic that
the account of the Last Supper, as St. Paul gives it, ** belonged
to the oldest element of the tradition, as Paul had received it in
Damascus." It was as "a sharply formulated tradition " (fest
formulierte Tradition) that he produced it. " He received the
tradition of the institution of the Last Supper in the same sense
' from the Lord ' as he received the Gospel as a whole. ... In fact
his information came naturally from the three years of his period
of instruction in Damascus, which was completed through his
intercourse with Peter and James in Jerusalem. Therefore it
cannot be plausibly suggested that he here (i.e. in 1 Cor. xi)
offers a special tradition about the Lord's Supper differing from
the general tradition."

THE INSTITUTION OF THE EUCHARIST 101

established, is it likely that such a vision would have
altered the practice of all the churches, including the
Jewish churches, for whom the first Gospel was written ?
This seems very improbable.

(3) Curiously enough the critics are driven to seek
the account of the original institution which has been
least deeply affected by St. Paul's vision in the Gospel
of his companion St. Luke, according to the shorter
reading of his Gospel, found in some Western authorities,
which leaves out all the words after " this is my body "
down to " poured out for you." I cannot but agree
with Dr. Salmon that the words should not be omitted
(see Dr. Salmon's The Human Element in the Gospels
[Murray], pp. 492 f.). I think we can only suppose that
their omission, like the omission of verse 17 in other
authorities, is due to a desire not to duplicate the giving
of a cup. It is utterly improbable that St. Luke meant
to reject both St. Mark's account and St. Paul's belief
and practice, with which he must have been well
acquainted.

(4) Dr. Rashdall's pages on the Last Supper (The Idea
of Atonement, pp. 37 ff.) are written to dispose of the
idea that " a certain expiatory value was attached by
our Lord Himself to His approaching death " in the
phrases " This is my body [which is given for you],"
" This is my blood of the covenant which is shed for
many [for the remission of sins]." With the subject of
the atonement we shall have to deal later on. But as
far as the accounts of the Eucharist are concerned
Dr. Rashdall's pages seem to me to represent that type
of " criticism " which is least worthy of the name
the type of criticism which is resolved at all costs to
eliminate what it does not want to accept. It is quite
certain that the words in St. Mark, St. Matthew, St.
Paul, and St. Luke (longer text) all alike postulate a
Christ who believed Himself to be inaugurating a new
covenant, according to the prophecies that so it should
be ; and to be inaugurating it by sacrifice by His blood
as the first covenant at Sinai had been inaugurated.
And as it had been declared that the servant of Jehovah
would, by " pouring out his soul unto death " as a guilt
offering, redeem " many," so St. Mark and St. Matthew,

8

102 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

by the use of the words " for many," convey to us the
thought that Jesus knew He was so doing.

(5) Some critics influenced by Schweitzer suppose
the words of St. Matthew, " I will not drink henceforth
of the fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it
new with you in my Father's kingdom," intimate that
our Lord expected the immediate coming of the End
and His union with His disciples at the heavenly feast
of the Kingdom. In part they make this the ground
for disbelieving that Jesus instituted any sacrament for
constant observance in His Church. He had no thought
for an intermediate period. But St. Mark, on whom
St. Matthew is based, and St. Luke omit the words
u with you." Without these words the saying has no
suggestion of any immediate renewal of fellowship with
His disciples. They only intimate that this is His last
meal on earth, and that the new wine of the Kingdom
lies immediately before Himself. And where the
emphasis has to be laid on the particular words, we
must prefer St. Mark and St. Luke in agreement to
St. Matthew's version. But of the eschatology of our
Lord we treat later in this volume.

NOTE B

On the question whether the First Church in
Jerusalem called Jesus Lord

We must not, of course, ignore the position taken by
critics of the school of Bousset, and others, that the
term " the Lord " (*v>o?) for Jesus was due to the
Hellenistic Christian churches at Antioch, Damascus,
Tarsus, and the like, who passed through a rapid assimila-
tion to the Pagan mystery religions, even before St. Paul
began his public ministry. These Pagan adherents of
mystery religions addressed their patron gods or god-
desses as Lord or Lady Lord Hermes, Lord Serapis,
Lady Cybele, etc. Thus Bousset holds that the title
(or its equivalent in Aramaic) was not used in the early
Jerusalem community, but was first used in these
Hellenistic churches. 1

1 Bousset, Kyrios Christos, pp. 77 ff. ; cf. Glover, Conflict of
Religions, p. 356.

JESUS IS LORD 103

On the other hand, let us hear Dalman x : "At first
the title, used in speaking to or of Jesus, was no more
than the respectful designation of the Teacher on the
part of His disciples. As soon as Jesus had entered
into His state of kingly majesty, it became among His
followers an acknowledgment of sovereignty ; and when
they addressed Him as the Son of God [which apparently
was not commonly done in the days before St. Paul],
then ' our Lord,' as applied to Jesus, was not widely
separated from the same designation for God. But it
must be remembered that the Aramaic-speaking Jews
did not, save exceptionally, designate God as 4 Lord,' so
that in the Hebraist section of the Jewish Christians
the expression ' Our Lord ' was used in reference to
Jesus only, and would be quite free from ambiguity."

The question is this, then Was the title Mar an or
Lord used of Jesus by the early Jerusalem community
in a sense betokening sovereignty (" Lord of all ") in
a sense which, among Greek Christians of a few years
later, easily merged into the sense of the same word as
applied to God (Jehovah), but which at present would
not have been precisely so used in Jerusalem ?

St. Luke plainly implies that it was, with the title
" Christ," used by them as their special term for the
exalted Jesus. 2 See Acts i 21, (?) 24, ii 36, (iv 33,
v 14), vii 59, (?) 60, viii 16, ix (1), 10, 13, 15, 17, (29),
(42), x 36, xi 8, 17, 20, (21), 23, (24).

There seems to me no kind of reason to doubt this,
especially as St. Luke appears to be careful to avoid
the title Son of God, till he comes to St. Paul. He
seems to imply that the one title was, and the other
was not, in use.

There are two other indications looking in the same
direction.

(1) First, that even in the thoroughly Greek church
of Corinth St. Paul assumes familiarity with the in-
vocation " Maranatha," " Come, O our Lord ! " in
Aramaic, which means clearly that it had an Aramaic

1 See Dalman's Words of Jesus, p. 327.

1 I have put in brackets ( ) the occasions where the word is
used by St. Luke in his own person and not ascribed specially to
some speaker other than himself.

104 FAITH OF THE FIRST CHURCH

origin. (The same Aramaic phrase occurs in the
Didache, which is a document (I think) quite inde-
pendent of St. Paul.) Bousset admits the force of this
as an argument that the title " Lord " goes back to the
original Aramaic-speaking church at Jerusalem, but
pleads that it is not impossible " that the Maranatha
formula had its origin, not on the ground of the original
Palestinian church, but in the bilingual region of the
Hellenistic communities of Antioch, Damascus, and
Tarsus itself." x Jo doubt it is possible : for we know
little or nothing of these communities and their manner
of speech. But the probability surely is that the
Hellenistic Christian communities there talked Greek.
Even in Jerusalem the names of the men chosen to
minister to the Hellenists are all Greek names. And
Bousset is surely mistaken in saying that St. Paul's
" tradition " goes back to these Syrian communities
only, and not to Jerusalem. Where St. Paul talks about
the tradition concerning the Resurrection (1 Cor. xv 3),
there he certainly means the tradition which he had
received from the earlier apostles i.e. at Jerusalem
for he ranks himself with them as " the last " and
irregular apostle, and adds, " Therefore, whether it were
I or they, so we preach." The tradition which he
received was therefore theirs before he came on the
scene. It came from Jerusalem. Again, in Rom. xv 19
St. Paul speaks of Jerusalem as his starting point.

(2) St. Paul was of course conscious that there were
" Gods many and Lords many," but certainly nothing
in his use of " Lord " as a title for Jesus Christ suggests
affinities with the heathen. It was, according to
St. Luke, used with special reference to the dignity of
the ascended Christ and His future coming. The phrase
" Maranatha," " Come, O our Lord," also suggests that.
St. Paul in his (probably earliest) Epistle to the Thes-
salonians constantly uses it with this suggestion : the
day of the Lord, the coming of the Lord, etc., see
1 Thess. ii 19, iii 13, iv 15, 16, 17, v 2; 2 Thess. i 7,
ii 1, 8, 14. But this is a distinctively Jewish idea. And

1 P. 84. It is noteworthy that Bousset confesses " Schwieriger
ist es eine Alterbestimmung fur das Vorkommen des griechischen
Kyriostitelfl in Syrien und seiner Umgebung zu gewinnen."

CHRIST AFTER THE FLESH 105

his characteristic phrase ev Kvpi'w suggests something
quite alien to the heathen cults.

On the whole, Bousset's position is singularly ill
founded.

NOTE C
0?i the phrase of St. Paul, " Christ after the flesh"

It is difficult to feel sure what exactly St. Paul means
by the words of 2 Cor. v 16 : " Wherefore we henceforth
know no man after the flesh: even though we have
known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him no
more." He is speaking, in a measure, generally of the
ambassadors for Christ, not only of himself. That is
(in part) the force of the plural " we." He is describing
how the appreciation of the love of Christ involves for
them death to their selfish selves, and to all the narrow-
ness of natural affections. " To know men after the
flesh " is to appraise them according to the standards
of class, or race, or disposition. To " know Christ after
the flesh " would be to appreciate Him as a Jew would
naturally appreciate Him, as the heaven-sent Messenger
who is to exalt the Jewish race and minister to Jewish
pride. St. Paul had felt this pride in Christ, but before
he recognized Jesus as the Christ. What he seems to
mean is that all such narrow and partial prejudices have
been abolished by the expulsive power of a love which
is spiritual and universal. It is difficult, I acknowledge,
to feel quite certain of St. Paul's meaning. But certainly
he does not mean by " knowing Christ after the flesh,"
knowing Him as having become really and fully human
in body as well as soul. That he could never repudiate.
See Dr. Menzies' commentary in loc.

CHAPTER IV

ST. JOHN AND THE REST OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

THE doctrine of the divine Sonship and incarnation
of Jesus Christ is given quite unmistakably in St.
Paul's Epistles and the Epistle to the Hebrews, but
it is given incidentally and by implication. But in
St. John's Gospel, read in the light of the prologue
and the conclusion, 1 it is given explicitly and directly ;
and the main, though not the only, object of the
writing of the Gospel appears to be to affirm the
doctrine with all the authority which the personal
testimony of the author can give it.

I call this Gospel St. John's, and on the whole I
believe it to give us at first hand the mature testi-
mony of the son of Zebedee. But the widespread
denial or doubt of his being the author, or the direct
author, of the Fourth Gospel, and the consequent
uncertainty about the authority to be attached to it,
have seemed to make it wiser to build the structure
of our argument independently of it in the first
instance. So we have built it especially upon St.
Mark and St. Luke, and upon the Acts, and upon St.
Paul, and the Epistle to the Hebrews. But having
done this we can supplement our argument with an
appeal to St. John.

1 John i 1-18 and John xx 30. Chap, xxi is evidently an
appendix, by the same author, I believe, as the rest of the book,
with an addition (verses 24, 25) by his companions.

106

DR. STANTON AND OTHERS 107

Dr. Slant on has recently, in a very careful study
of the Fourth Gospel, given us a theory of what
one may call "mediate Johannine authorship."
The actual author was, he supposes, a younger man
than the Apostle, who had gone to Asia perhaps
earlier than he, but had there become intimately
associated with him, and who also had independent
memories of his own " who could remember having
sometimes himself seen or heard Jesus, and who
felt himself possessed of a knowledge, which was
at least almost immediate, of the divine revelation
made in the Lord, by intimate association with His
personal disciples very soon after His departure." l
I cannot be satisfied with this theory. It seems
to me impossible to harmonize with the impression
made by the Fourth Gospel. I cannot doubt that it
at least claims to be in its whole bulk and the same
applies to the First Epistle a personal testimony,

1 Stanton, The Gospels as Historical Witnesses, Part iii
(Cambridge, 1920), p. 281.

Since this chapter was written, I have noted that Ed. Meyer,
Ur&prung t i p. 312, treats as ridiculous any doubts that the author
of the Fourth Gospel intended to represent himself as " the disciple
whom Jesus loved " and as John the son of Zebedee. " This
was the mask he assumed." He cannot understand how modern
critics can have brought themselves to doubt this. Also he is
confident that the author's conception of the Logos is derived from
Palestinian Jewish sources (the "Memra" doctrine), and not from
Greek philosophy, or Philo, though he may have known of the
current Greek philosophical term (p. 318). I have also read Dr.
Burney's Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel (Oxford, 1922), who
is (of course) insistent on its Palestinian origin, pp. 37 ff. In his
opinion the author must have been an eyewitness of the events
he describes really " the disciple whom Jesus loved " : but he
identifies him as " John the presbyter " and not the apostle. He
thinks that he must have been a Jew of Jerusalem, belonging to
the priestly circle, and well trained in the Rabbinical schools, and
that he wrote the Gospel in Aramaic, probably at Antioch soon
after A.D. 75, before he took up his residence at Ephesus. I am
not without hopes that the essentially Palestinian, and not Hellen-
istic, origin and character of the Gospel, and its high value as an
historical witness both to the events of our Lord's life and to His
teaching, may soon come to be regarded as an " assured result "
of critical enquiry.

108 ST. JOHN AND THE REST

so personal that it must be first-hand, and I see
no sufficient reason to doubt that the claim is true.
But Dr. Stanton's study at least shows very cogent
reasons for believing that both the narrative of the
Fourth Gospel and the discourses rest upon a real
apostolic experience, and I hope that critical students
will heed his arguments. 1

Thus he seems to me to show convincingly that
the prologue to the Gospel, though of course it
stands first, is not by any means the governing
factor in the whole book. 2 On the contrary, in the
bulk of the book, after the prologue, there is no
allusion to the doctrine of the (personal) Word of
God which is the characteristic feature of the prologue,
and " the word of God " is given, as in the First
Epistle, only its normal meaning of the divine
message. 3 Jesus there appears only under those
titles which He certainly used of Himself the
Son of Man and the Son of God or the title which
was certainly ascribed to Him with His express
sanction the Christ. The substance of the book,
which is of a narrative character, must, Dr. Stanton
argues, be taken to represent the real experience
(and the conviction based upon the experience)
of an apostle or apostolic group, which was shared
by or communicated to the mind of the author,
supposed to be a different person. To put this
experience on record was his primary object. Only
at the last moment, so to speak, before he wrote
his " gospel " did the current idea of the Logos
(the divine Word or Reason or Power always active

1 Op. cit., chap, vi, p. 209.

8 Pp. 166 ff. This argument is substantially also Harnack's,
see p. 167. See also D. C. Somervill, A Short History of our Re-
ligion (G. Bell & Son), p. Ill : "A kind of preface or prologue,
which may also be regarded as an epilogue or summing up of^ the
whole matter."

3 See John v 38, x 35, xv 25, xvii 6, 14, 17. This is also the
sense of " the word " in 1 John i 2.

ST. JOHN AND THE SYNOPTISTS 109

ill the universe) suggest itself to the author as a
suitable term to express the nature and functions
of the Son. So he formulates his dogmatic prologue
with the help of the new term with which both
his Jewish training and his Asiatic experience had
made him familiar. Thus the idea of the prologue
must be thought of as having presented itself to
his mind only after the narrative and ideas of the
body of the Gospel were already formed and fixed,
and, Dr. Stanton would say, after the First Epistle
had been written. Further, the bulk of the Gospel
must represent matter which had already become
familiar in the oral instruction given to the congrega-
tions of Asiatic Christians. 1

Dr. Stanton also indicates with admirable precision
how closely akin the idea of the divine sonship of
Jesus, as presented in the Fourth Gospel, is to what
is found already in the foundation documents of
the Synoptic Gospels 2 to the conception of divine
sonship implied in the narrative of the Temptation
and presented in great sayings of our Lord which
have been already examined ; and how the ideas
of St. John vi about Christ, as through His flesh
and blood the spiritual food of the world, are really
implied in the language which He is recorded to
have used, in the Synoptic Gospels and by St. Paul,
at the Last Supper. On such grounds Dr. Stanton
argues that the idea of the divine sonship of Jesus
presented in the body of the Gospel must be accepted

1 See pp. 50. 282.

8 Pp. 267 ff. Cp. Harnack, The Sayings of Jesus, p. 302 : "If
the first evangelist himself wrote the passage [St. Matt, xi 25-7]
as we read it, then even with the most cautious interpretation of
the passage, his own Christology approached very nearly to that
of the Johannine writings in one of the most important points."
In view of the fact that the saying occurs in substantially identical
form in St. Matthew and St. Luke, and must therefore have so
occurred in Q, we should substitute for Harnack's opening words
something of this kind " If, as we cannot doubt, the first recorder
of our Lord's words, whose written record lies behind all our present
Gospels, wrote the passage as we read it," etc.

110 ST. JOHN AND THE REST

as resting on genuine utterances of Christ, and he
shows the reasonableness of believing that, if such
utterances were really made as the Synoptists record,
they were more frequently and more emphatically
made than there appears. "It is improbable that
such sayings could have been spoken, and yet have
stood alone in the intercourse of Jesus with His
disciples. Even in order that they might be rendered
intelligible, and be duly impressed upon their minds,
they would need to be repeated." Dr. Stanton
also argues afresh with great force how well the
Synoptic narrative can be fitted into the frame-
work of the story of the Fourth Gospel, and I should
add how much on the whole it gains thereby in
intelligibility.

I have written so much by way of preface because
w r riters are apt to assume that, if they reject the
direct authorship of St. John the son of Zebedee,
they can dispose of the whole Gospel as a work of
pious imagination. I do not agree that the direct
authorship can be rejected. But what I think is a
prejudice against the authorship of St. John is still
a very strong prejudice, and it seems to me very
important that the world which especially claims
to be critical should remember that it has still to
reckon with the Fourth Gospel, both as to its incidents
and its teaching, as making an historical claim which
cannot be ignored, and representing a tradition quite
independent of St. Paul.

I always find myself impressed by the fact that
this Gospel four times calls attention to occasions
when the disciples failed to apprehend at the time
the meaning of some word of Jesus, and only after-
wards in retrospect perceived what it had really
been, 1 and also calls attention to our Lord's having
promised His disciples that the Holy Spirit, whom
they were to receive after His departure, would so
1 John ii 22, viii 27, x 6, xii 16.

THE DIVINE SONSHIP IN ST. JOHN 111

act within their minds as not only to interpret what
they remembered of His words, but also to bring out
of their "subconscious selves" what had been
forgotten or ignored. 1 That such should have been
their experience seems to me to be thoroughly in
accordance with human nature. 2 Thus I am disposed
to believe that the record of our Lord's words con-
tained in the common matter of St. Matthew and
St. Luke represents the first memory of what He had
said, more or less exactly as He said it, but the
Fourth Gospel gives us what had been a gradually
growing recollection in the mind of St. John and
probably of others, viz. that the sayings of our Lord
about His divine sonship had been more frequent
and more emphatic than the earliest record had
implied.

Here in the Fourth Gospel, then, St. John, pre-
supposing the Synoptic record, supplements it with
incidents and discourses especially intended to bear
on the point of divine sonship. 3 Thus, apart from
the comments of the Evangelist, so far as they can
be kept distinct from the words of Christ, we have
a discourse of Christ (cap. v) in which He asserts

1 xiv 26, cf. xiii 7.

1 D. C. Somerviil, op. cit., p. 106, quotes from Mr. Bruce Glasier's
memoir of William Morris, written twenty-five years after his
death, the following : "I have found that my memory is, on many
occasions, subject to what seems to be a sort of ' illumination ' or
* inspiration.' Thus when I have fixed my mind on one, say, of
the incidents recalled in these chapters, the scene has begun to
unfold itself, perhaps slowly at first, but afterwards rapidly and
clearly. Meditating upon it for a time, I have lifted my pen and
begun to write. Then to my surprise the conversations, long
buried or hidden somewhere in my memory, have come back to
me sometimes with the greatest fulness, word for word, as we say.
Nay, not only the words, but the tones, the pauses and the gestures
of the speaker." My own belief is that in the Fourth Gospel the
memory of incidents and things seen is precise and clear cut. But
the memory of words, though true in its ultimate substance, has
become in its form transmuted and sometimes enlarged by medita-
tion. In almost all cases, however, clear-cut sayings of our Lord
which are original and verbally genuine can be discerned.

3 See xx 31.

112 ST. JOHN AND THE REST

at once, as always, His subordination to the Father,
but also His constant association with Him in His
works, in such general sense as, perhaps, suggests
His co-operation with the Father even in the processes
of nature. " My Father worketh hitherto, and I
work " (v 17-18). The co-operation actually asserted
(verses 19-29) is something quite transcending the
human level, though He who so works is called
" Son of Man." i That is to say, there is asserted
a divine sonship belonging to the Son of Man under
human conditions, which yet can only belong to the
man, because He had come into His manhood out
of a pre-existence in God. 1 This is affirmed again
and again in the next chapter (vi 38, 41, 62), as
also that He is to return, in His manhood, to the
heaven whence He came. Again in the discourse
of chapter viii this pre-existent sonship is affirmed
and identified with the eternal existence of God
(verse 58). Again the Son and the Father are
declared to be one thing (x 80) and, as has been
explained above, 2 I do not think the apparent
minimizing of this claim (verses 33-86), when the
Jews rightly understood it as a claim of Godhead,
can be taken at its face value. The almost startling
incompatibility of the minimizing explanation of

1 There are two assertions by our Lord that " the Father " is
" greater " than He (x 29, xiv 28). It has been long a matter
of controversy in the Church (see Westcott's note) whether this
superior " greatness " of the Father to the Son refers to the God-
head of the Son or to His manhood. It seems to me that the words
so far like the words of our Lord recorded in St. Mark and St.
Matthew, asserting the Son's ignorance of the day and hour of the

i " end of the world " are spoken by the Son in His manhood
and with direct reference to His present human state, but that
it is not an adequate explanation of them to say that they describe

; Him as " inferior to the Father as touching His manhood." For
they refer not to His manhood merely (which, according to the
teaching of the Church, had no separate personal existence) but
to Himself. They seem to me to describe an inferiority which
the incarnation of the Son has (so to speak) intensified, but which
depends upon and postulates an eternal subordination.
'See pp. 28 f.

THE LAST DISCOURSES 113

His divine sonship with the general argument of
the Gospel does indeed give us a guarantee that the
Evangelist would not have preserved the words
unless he had felt sure that they were really spoken
by our Lord ; but I think they must be interpreted,
not as minimizing His meaning, but as intended to
force the Jews to consider that, according to their
authoritative Scriptures, something much less than
Godhead would justify a claim of divine sonship
in some sense. They could not, therefore, dispose
of His inconvenient claim upon them merely by
repudiating its full implication. More than this
kind of meaning cannot be attached to this strange
and isolated passage consistently with the constant
tenor of the Gospel as a whole.

In the last discourses immediately before His
passion our Lord is constantly represented as one
who was conscious of having in one sense come
from God but without thereby leaving God, for
He was still abiding in the Father and the Father
in Him, and to see Him is to see the Father and
as being immediately to return to God to resume
an interrupted glory and to fulfil the purpose of
His mission by the bestowal of the Spirit, whom
the Father is to send in His name and at His hands. 1
We shall have to return upon these last discourses
about the Holy Spirit. All that we need now to
do is to assure ourselves that in them, as in the rest
of the Gospel, what we are presented with, in our
Lord's words, is an indisputable and constantly
reiterated assertion on His part of divine sonship.
This is primarily an assertion of what He was then
and there in His manhood ; but it is also frequently
and plainly implied that He has been through the
ages the Son with the Father, dependent upon Him
for His very life, but also belonging essentially to
the divine being ; that He came into the world
1 xir 16, 26, xv 26, xvi 7.

LIBRARY ST. MARY S COLLEGE

114 ST. JOHN AND THE REST

voluntarily in fulfilment of a divine mission of re-
demption to accept death at the hands of men for
their salvation and that He was about to resume
an interrupted glory on His return to heaven as
Son of Man, carrying thither His manhood to become
through the Spirit, whom He is to send down from
the Father upon His chosen body, the fountain head
of a new life.

Now I do not say that the author of the Fourth
Gospel was unacquainted with St. Paul. That can
hardly have been the case. But I say that all this
body of teaching appears to have grown quite inde-
pendently of St. Paul. It has its own independent
phraseology and characteristic ideas, notably the
dominant ideas of " li^ht " and " life " and " truth,"
of the conflict of belief and unbelief, of judgment
perpetually being enacted, and of eternal life already
enjoyed. And it must be held to rest upon the
foundation of a real tradition of the words of Jesus
in the churches of Asia and in the school of St.
John ; for myself I go farther, and believe it records
both the real memory and the deep meditation of
St. John as given us by himself. And I do not
see any point at which the record of the Fourth
Gospel apart from the prologue, which has still
to be considered suggests the influence of the
current Logos-philosophy of the Hellenistic world.
There is really nothing needed to account for it
but the Old Testament and the actual life and
teaching of Christ.

The outcome of this experience upon the author
has been to generate an idea of Christ as to the nature
of which he leaves us in no doubt. He believed
that Christ, the Son of Man, was the eternal Son of
God, who is very God. He identifies Him with the
Jehovah of the Old Testament, for he speaks of
Isaiah as having seen His (Christ's) " glory " when,
in his vision in the temple, he saw the form of Jehovah

ST. JOHN'S PROLOGUE 115

sitting upon His throne l ; and he represents the
penitent Thomas as calling the risen Jesus " my
Lord and my God." Also he plainly believes the
eternal Son of God to have come or been sent by
God into the world as man the Son of Man. But
there does not seem to me to be any trace of a belief
in a pre-existent man or Son of Man. It was the
pre-existent Son of God who was sent into the world
(iii 16-18) as Son of Man, and who after His death
and resurrection carried that manhood into heaven 2
in pursuance of a divine purpose of redemption.
This alone gives a fair interpretation of the language
of the Gospel as a whole. The author's mind is
preoccupied with making it evident that Jesus was
really the Son of God. But he leaves us in no doubt
as to the reality of His manhood, both bodily and
spiritual. 3

All this belief of "St. John " concerning Jesus
grew, I believe with Dr. Stanton, on the ground of
a real historical tradition or (I should say) of a real
memory, and in substance antedates the prologue.
It is with this belief already in his mind that, when
he came to give his Gospel written form, he found in the

1 See Burney, op. cit., p. 37.

* In vi 62 our Lord is represented as anticipating His ascension :
" What and if ye see the Son of man ascending up where he was
before." In iii 13 I think we must suppose that we have a re-
flection of the Evangelist and not a word of Christ. The ascension
has plainly already occurred. The sense in which " the Son of
man came down from heaven " is denned by the verses which
follow. It is in the sense that " God sent his Son " (verses 16
and 17) and His " only begotten Son " (verse 18) into the world
to save the world and that He came to save the world as man, the
Son of Man.

3 No doubt the reality of our Lord's manhood physically is
what he sees represented symbolically in the blood from His pierced
side, xix 34-5. Cf. 1 John v 6 ; see my Exposition of St. John's
Epistles, in loc. ; see John iv 6 and xix 28 for His being tired and
thirsty. Dr. Burkitt (The Gospel History and its Transmission*
p. 233) has the courage to say that " In no early Christian document
is the real humanity of Jesus so emphasized as in the Fourth
Gospel." The reality of His human spirit and human sympathy
appears in xi 33-8 xii 27, xiii l.etc.

116 ST. JOHN AND THE REST

current idea of the Logos (the word or reason of God)
the best vehicle for expressing his doctrine in a concise
and dogmatic shape, such as would arrest the imagi-
nation and conciliate the sympathies of the world for
which he was writing. For his world was plainly
one deeply liable at the moment to be diverted by
the rising tide of " Gnostic " speculation from the
belief in the Incarnation, or (what is the same thing)
the belief that Jesus is the Son of God. It appears
indeed very vividly in St. John's Epistles that his
world was a troubled world a world full of move-
ments calculated to mislead and destroy this funda-
mental faith. 1 And all these movements would
recognize in the term " the Logos " one of their
keywords or favourite thoughts.

For the Hellenistic world was possessed with the
idea of a Law or Force or Mind moulding and govern-
ing the universe. This was the God immanent in
the world, "in whom we live and move and have
our being," of which the mind or spirit in each man
was a minute portion. This current belief was of
Stoic origin. Obviously, like the modern more or
less pantheistic utterances of Shelley and Goethe and
Wordsworth (in his earlier phase), this philosophy
responds to a widespread demand of the human spirit
that it shall be able to see God in all things and
to feel its own kinship with the divine. Before St.
John's days it had taken many different forms and
moved in many different directions. Thus a Jew of
Alexandria before our Lord's time, in the Book of

1 The signs of trouble are apparent in 1 John i 18-26, iv 1-6,
v 6-10; 2 John 7-11. The precise nature of this hostile move-
ment I have sought to describe ha Epistles of St. John, pp. 109 S.,
165 ff., 170 f., 191 ff. It denied St. John's central faith, viz. that
in the man Jesus the highest and lowest had become one that
the man Jesus was really and personally the Son of God come in
the flesh, and it denied this by separating the man Jesus from the
divine Christ, who was represented only as coming down upon the
man at His baptism out of the heavenly regions and leaving Him
before His passion.

THE IDEA OF THE LOGOS 117

Wisdom, had assimilated this Hellenistic belief in a
divine energy and law and spirit, immanent in the
world, and had identified it with the Wisdom of God.
As we have already seen, 1 in this beautiful little book
Wisdom appears as something more than a mere
personification of a divine quality. It is a living
being, as well as a pervasive force throughout the
whole universe. It is a spirit expressive of the inner
being of God, and it is the revealer of God in nature
and to man through His saints and prophets. Here
we have an intermediate being presented to us inter-
mediate between the supreme and inaccessible God
and the material world. And it is a very active
power, which later on in the book, under the name of
the Word of God, is described as leaping down from
the divine throne to work His miracles of judgment
upon Egypt, " a stern warrior into the midst of the
doomed land." 2

Later Philo, the Jew of Alexandria, elaborated this
conception of an intermediate being, whether we are
to call it person or no, who as the divine Logos is
not only the immanent reason and law of the world,
but also the active instrument of God and the re-
vealer of His mysterious being. This idea of an
intermediate being between the high and inaccessible
God and the material world became exceedingly popular
in all sorts of forms. But outside the influence of
the Jewish religion it is almost always associated
with the notion of matter as essentially evil, so that
the supreme God could not be conceived of as either
responsible for creating it, or enduring to come in
immediate contact with it. Nor was the human
imagination generally content with one divine or
semi-divine intermediate being. The world teemed
with beliefs in mysterious "powers" or "Gods,"
who in various ways represented a divine activity
for man's enlightenment and salvation. These powers

1 Above, p. 92. ? Wisd. xviii 15.

9

118 ST. JOHN AND THE REST

were identified with the Gods of old popular beliefs
for example with the old nature spirits who died
in the decay of autumn and lived again in the rebirth
of spring. These now reappear as Saviour Gods,
who will redeem men from the endless flux and
misery of material life and bring them by a new birth,
symbolically represented, into the security of the
heavenly life beyond death. All these kinds of
beliefs whether in the Logos as immanent mind or
spirit of the universe, or in the Logos as an inter-
mediate being between the supreme God and the
material world, or in divine persons, vaguely con-
ceived, through whom, by mysteries of initiation
and sacramental participation, men can be saved
from the miseries and fluctuations of material life and
brought into the upper world of light and eternity
were already at work in the Hellenistic world,
that is the world of mixed Oriental and Greek culture,
when Christianity came into it. Obviously, this
class of beliefs provided a condition in the souls of
men, or a spiritual atmosphere, favourable to the
spread of any religion of redemption or salvation,
like the Christian religion. Obviously also, with
its innumerable intermediate beings, or its one
Logos neither really God nor really man, and with
its almost universal belief in matter as so evil a
thing that the high God could not directly touch it
or be responsible for it, this whole class of beliefs
was calculated, in its many movements, to pervert
fundamentally the Christian tradition.

This St. John sees very vividly. Thus in the Pro-
logue to his Gospel he accepts the term Logos, which
has both its Hellenistic meanings such as we have
been describing, and also its properly Jewish meaning,
which we are very familiar with in the Old Testa-
ment" the word of God " by which He created
the world and proceeds forth to govern His people
through His prophets, and to chastise the rebellious

THE PROLOGUE PARAPHRASED 119

with His judgments. He seems to say to the Jewish
world " All that you have believed about God as
proceeding forth by His word to create and govern
nature, and to reveal Himself to man by His prophets,
belongs to Jesus, and in Him is consummated."
And to the Hellenistic world " All that you hare
imagined of a divine activity in the world and a
divine spirit, all that you have dreamed of a divine
mediator or mediators between the highest and
the lowest, and of mysteries of salvation, here have
their justification and fulfilment, and also their
correction."

Now I will attempt to paraphrase the prologue so as
to bring out its general meaning, 1 referring from time
to time to sayings in the Gospel which illustrate it.

At the beginning, before the world was, you must
think of God as having already with Him His Wordj
the expression of Himself, God with God ; and the
whole world of created things without exception was
brought into being through this Word. Nor must
you think of the Word as a mere quality of God, but
as a person with God, in whom is life in its fulness.
[As the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He
given to the Son to have life in Himself.] Thus as
all the life in creation is from Him, so specially is
the life of men. To them as rational beings life
is given in their reason and conscience as light
that is as illumination and guidance, as a " way " to
be chosen and followed. So the light is given to
all men. But men have loved darkness rather than
light. They have followed their own desires and
fancies instead of the divine leading. That is what
we see in the world at large. The light is shining in
the darkness and the darkness has not admitted it. 2
So it was when John the Baptist came, who was

1 Where the reading is disputed, or the punctuation, I simply
take what seems to me the better reading or stopping.

8 Or " nevertheless the darkness has never overwhelmed the light."

120 ST. JOHN AND THE REST

not indeed the Light, but was a witness to the Light,
calling men to faith in Another. And all the time
that Other, the Word who is the True Light, lighten-
ing every man who comes into the world, was coming,
and at last He came. The world to which He came
\ras His own, as He was the creator of it, but it
would not recognize Him. He came thither as to
His own possession, but men His own refused to
receive Him. That is, most men refused, but there
were some who welcomed Him, and they received
from Him the title to sonship of God, as all men
receive it who believe on Him as He has disclosed
Himself. This sonship is given by a new birth, not by
the methods of natural birth. It proceeds not from
mixture of human seeds, nor from carnal desire,
nor from the will of a man, but purely from the will
of God. 1 And all this coming of God into the world
to enlighten and to regenerate those who would receive
Him reached its fulfilment thus the Word became
ilesh. Our creator and illuminator took our nature
and tabernacled among us, as the glory of God taber-
nacled among the people of Israel 2 ; and we His

1 Aa will bo Been, the phrases used, " not from bloods (i.e. the
mingling of human seeds) nor carnal desire, nor the will of a man
(a husband)," describe exactly the negative conditions of the
human birth of Jesus of a virgin mother. Many of the early Fathers
in fact had the singular, not the plural, in their text of St. John.
They read it " who was born." Some modern scholars, including
Dr. Inge and Dr. Burney, accept this as the original reading. I do
not think this is probable. But I think it is certain (with Dr.
Ohase, Zahn and others) that the passage describes our new birth
to divine sonship after the pattern picture of His birth who alone
IB in the fullest sense Son of God : so that the reader is reminded
of a begetting and birth which took place without carnal impulse
or the act of any man.

* In this phrase " the Word was made flesh and tabernacled
among us, and we beheld His glory " St. John has brought
together three characteristic Jewish ideas, which the Aramaic
iTargums lead us to believe were already in current use : Memra (the
Word of God, constantly used to express God in action), Shekinta
or (Hebrew) Shekinah (the tabernacle or abiding-place of God
among His people, as above the cherubim in the Holy of Holies,
and on special occasions besides), and Yekara (the glory which

ST. JOHN'S DOCTRINE JEWISH 121

witnesses who speak to you beheld His glory, be-
holding God in Him, as men see a father in his only
son, full of the divine favour and truth. Here was
one greater than John the Baptist and prior to
him, as he himself bore witness : here was one who
could do and give what Moses could not do or give.
For the vision of God has been always unattain-
able to men : but here God only-begotten, the
Son, whose place is in the bosom of the Father,
hath interpreted Him [as He said, " He that hath
seen me hath seen the Father "].

It is after this preface in which " the writer plainly
announces the full and ultimate conclusion of beliefs
to which he has come," x that he begins his story.

There is one point on which I ought to make my
meaning clear before leaving St. John.

It has been for long a matter of ceaseless discus-
sion whether St. John's term the Logos is derived
from the Hebrew and Palestinian tradition or from
the Hellenistic world of thought. I cannot but believe
that in St. John's own mind its origin and mean-
ing are fundamentally Palestinian and Jewish. I do
not deny that he chooses the term as one familiar
to the Hellenists. That I have already said. I do
not suppose he had ever read Philo or any Stoic
philosopher. But the idea and the word ** Logos "
were in the atmosphere of the Asiatic churches and
St. John with great discernment as it appeared
sees in it the best word to interpret to his generation
the idea of the Son of God and His relation to the
world both before and in the Incarnation. Neverthe-
less his own mind accepts and uses the term rather

under the cloudy veil shows itself in flashes). See below, p. 128,
and cf. Burney, pp. 35 ff.

1 See Dr. H. S. Holland, The Philosophy of Faith and the Fourth
Gospel, p. 262. I was delighted to read in Dr. Armitage Robinson's
recent lecture on the Fourth Gospel, given in Manchester Cathedral ,
an enthusiastic appreciation of the value of Dr. Holland's inter-
pretation of the Fourth Gospel.

122 ST. JOHN AND THE REST

in the Hebrew than in the Greek sense. Not exclu-
sively, but on the whole and first of all, the term in
Greek meant Reason : while in the Old Testament
the Word of God meant not reason at all, but the
utterance of the will of God, or the expression of
His mind. So as applied by St. John to the Son
it means at bottom much what St. Paul meant by
calling Him God's " image," and the author of the
Epistle to the Hebrews by calling Him " the expres-
sion of his substance."

In the Targums, or Aramaic interpretations of the
Hebrew Scriptures, " the Word (Memra) of God " is
constantly used where the Hebrew speaks simply of
God. 1 The "Word of God" is almost " God in
action." In this sense, as has been already men-
tioned, " the Word of God " occurs in the Book of
Wisdom, 2 and in a closely allied sense " the Wisdom
of God." Dr. Rendel Harris 8 has shown how
closely the phrases of St. John's prologue are modelled
upon the description of the activity of the divine
Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs and, still more,
in the Book of Wisdom. St. John was probably
acquainted with the Targums, which were already
assuming fixed form, and with Proverbs and Wisdom.
So it was from Jewish sources that he derived the
term which he chose to express the scope and mean-
ing of the Incarnation. But we cannot doubt
that its familiar use in the Hellenic world, of which
he cannot have been ignorant, partly determined
his choice. In the generation after St. John it was
chiefly in its Hellenic sense that the phrase came
to be understood. But it was not so in St. John's
mind, nor did his Gospel grow on any Hellenic soil. 4

1 See the passages quoted by Burney, op. cit. p. 38.
1 Wisd. xviii 15, see above, p. 117.

3 See his Prologue to St. John's Gospel, Camb., 1917.

4 For the argument of Reitzenstein, who would trace the whole
intellectual and mystical substance of the Fourth Gospel to a Hellen-
Btic (Qraeco -Egyptian) source, see appended note at the end of
the chapter, p. 133.

ADOPTIONISM 123

II

We have passed in review the Synoptic Gospels,
the Acts, the Epistles of St. Paul and that to the
Hebrews, and the Gospel of St. John. In these
Epistles and in the Fourth Gospel we have found
a clearly expressed doctrine of Jesus Christ as an
eternal and divine person, the Son of God, the divine
agent in the creation and maintenance of all that
exists, who at the last was incarnate for man's
redemption in Jesus Christ. We have found the
grounds of this doctrine in the Synoptic Gospels.
Nothing else can explain the impression made by
Jesus upon the disciples and His own language
about His divine sonship. In the first part of the
Acts, however, before the appearance of St. Paul
upon the scene, we seem to find a situation in which
Jesus, as the exalted and glorified Christ, is indeed
treated as divine and worshipped as divine, but in
which no question of pre-existence or divine sonship
seems to be entertained. This situation is often
represented as if the first disciples regarded Christ
as strictly only a human person who, as Christ, had
been exalted to divine honours on the throne of
God, or deified. This is what is called the " adop-
tionist " theory of Christ's divinity. It played its
part as a heresy among Jewish Christians in the
second century under the name of Ebionism, and
it was the clearly defined doctrine of Paul of Samo-
sata in the third. But it is quite misleading so to
describe the state of mind of the first Christians
in Jerusalem. Ebionism, or Paul of Samosata's
doctrine, was a clearly held theory. On the other
hand, the Jerusalem church appears to have existed
for some years without any theory, simply because
their minds were absorbed in the sense of the glorified
Christ, the Lord of all, at the right hand of God,
and of the Spirit whom He had given them. Their

124 ST. JOHN AND THE REST

creed was, " Jesus is Christ and Lord. He has
given us the Spirit." But when, after a few years,
the converted Saul felt at once the pressing need of
a theory of Christ's person, and found this need
satisfied in Christ's own language about His sonship
to God, and so proclaimed the doctrine of the In-
carnation, his words excited no dismay or dispute.
Universally, as far as we know, the churches accepted
his position. This means that, though hitherto
they had not felt the pressure of the need for an
explanation of their worship of the glorified Christ,
yet, when once it was felt, they found it not in
adoptionism but in the theory of the Incarnation ;
and they found the warrant of this doctrine in Christ's
own language. I cannot help thinking that in the
memory and mind of some at least of the apostolic
company this explanation must have been ferment-
ing under the surface of their public witness before
St. Paul appeared ; otherwise his teaching would
have excited more comment. The celebration of
the sacrament of Christ's body and blood, as well
as the memory of some of His words, must, one
would think, inevitably have led to such thoughts.
What remains for us to do is to examine the rest of
the documents of the New Testament, those especially
which appear to be most independent of St. Paul, to
sec whether " adoptionism " is to be found in them,
and first of all the most non-Pauline of all the books,
the greatest expression of the spirit of Jewish apo-
calypse, the " Revelation of John the Divine."

(a) The Revelation.

There is no more thrilling book in the literature
of the world than the Apocalypse of John. It is
this quite independently of the question who John
the Seer is, whether the " Son of Thunder," the
apostle, or the supposed " Presbyter John," or
whether the visions belong to an earlier or later date

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF THE APOCALYPSE 125

in the first century problems which we need not dis-
cuss. 1 And it is also the most Judaic book in the New
Testament, beyond all question. The God who there
confronts us in all His majesty and all His tremendous
activity of judgment, is the God of the Old Testament
in His most fearful aspects. There are touches of
tenderness, but they are rare. If this book is really
written by the author of the Fourth Gospel and
the First Epistle of John, then we must suppose
that the acute crisis of persecution forced the Apostle
to concentrate his mind for the time on that part
of the truth about God which the Son of Thunder
had never forgotten, but which had been pressed
into the background by the fresher revelation of
divine, self-sacrificing love. Now the tremendous
God of Justice God the almighty and God the
avenger occupies the whole stage. But with one
startling difference. The One God of this uncom-
promising Jewish monotheism has a partner on His
throne. It is now " the throne of God and of the
Lamb," and the adoration of the whole world is
directed towards His partner as to Him. There
can be no question that Jesus, " the Lamb as it had
been slain," is on the throne of God and treated as
God, And there can be no doubt that this exalta-
tion of the Lamb to divine functions and honours
is explained on the principle of merit. It is the 1
reward of His supreme self-sacrifice. 2 All this
suggests the " Adoptionist " Christology sometimes
ascribed to the Apocalypse. But we are pulled
up short at the idea of such an ascription. Is it
conceivable that in a book so intensely Jewish
another should be equalled to God ? Has God, the
God of Israel, forgotten His ancient " jealousy " ?

1 Of course Burney's theory of the Aramaic original of the Gospel
enables him easily to assign Gospel and Apocalypse to the same
person the presbyter John for the Greek of tha Gospel is nofc
his Greek, but a translation.

J See Rev. v.

126 ST. JOHN AND THE REST

There is, we notice, twice in the book, when John
would " worship " an angelic messenger, a stern
repudiation on his part of the homage which only
God must receive. 1 Well then, we are bound to be,
as I say, pulled up short at the proposed intrusion
into the heart of Judaism of an idea so alien to it.
We look again at the language of the Apocalypse.
Certainly there is no theory of Christ's person there.
But there are two points which are enlightening.

(1) That the great phrase (in part taken from
Isaiah), which is here heard from the lips of God
to signify His activity from the beginning of time
to the end of it " the Alpha and the Omega, the
first and the last " is also heard from the lips of
Christ. 2 This means unmistakably that the associa-
tion of Christ in the activity of God had no beginning
in time. No doubt it was only in time that He was
glorified as God in His manhood. But what rendered
that possible was His co- existence and co-ordination
with God from the beginning.

(2) Such also is the lesson of the figure whose
! name is called the Word of God. 3 This surely is

an intensely Jewish phrase. " The Word " here is
not, I think, used as in the prologue to the Gospel.
But it indicates something intensely active and
energetic. It reminds us of the startling simile
in the Book of Wisdom, already referred to more
than once, where the Word of God is figured as a
warrior leaping off His divine throne to rush in a
moment to execute divine justice. It is the activity
of God personified, as He has shown Himself in the
government of the world. But we cannot question
that the figure on the horse in the Apocalypse is
Christ, 4 and this also means that the seer of the
Apocalypse identified Jesus the Christ with the

1 xix 10, xxii 9, and contrast i 17.

See i 8, xxi 6, on the lips of God , cf. Is. xli 4, xliii 10, xliv 6.
On the lips of Christ, i 17, ii 8, xxii 13.

3 xix 11-16. * See Swete's and Charles' notes on the passage.

THE EPISTLE OF JAMES 127

divine warrior of the Old Testament, that is with
God the world ruler. Decisively then, we must
say that the theology of the Apocalypse is not
adoptionist. The person who is Jesus existed
from the beginning with God and in God.

(b) The Epistle of James

When we pass to the Epistle of James we pass
to another deeply Judaic document. And it is, as
concerns both its origin and its date, a rather mysteri-
ous document, though, on the whole, I think we may
still assign it to " the Lord's brother," and date it
accordingly before he was executed (as Josephus tells
us) in Jerusalem, under Annas the Younger, the
Jewish High Priest, in A.D. 62. As to its spiritual
and moral value, it speaks for itself as plainly as
any document of the New Testament. It is full of
the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, and no less
clearly of the spirit of the ancient prophets and the
Wisdom literature. Theologically there is very little
in it that is specifically Christian as distinct from
what is Jewish. It is severely monotheist. 1 There
is also plainly no trace of St. Paul's influence, and
the writer appears to combat, not St. Paul's doctrine
of justification, as written in his Epistles, but some
perverted version of it. 2 His main interest is, I
think, rightly interpreted by Hort. It is in the
ideal for man disclosed by the word of God at his
creation, to which his conscience bears witness, and
which it is God's present purpose that he should
recover. " Grace," St. James would say, " is not
contrary to nature, but the restoration of nature."

As to the person of Christ, with which alone we
are here concerned, there are three indications of
St. James's mind. (1) In his initial greeting to his

1 ii 19, iv 12.

Fundamentally St. James' doctrine of justification ia easily
harmonized with St. Paul's.

128 ST. JOHN AND THE REST

Jewish readers he couples the Lord Jesus Christ
with God as He whose servant or slave he is ; and the
more we think of this familiar phrase the more fully
it seems to involve the deity of Jesus, when it is
used by a faithful Jew ; for it means that he can
surrender himself as wholly to Jesus as to God, and
that, in fact, the one surrender involves the other.
(2) At the end of the Epistle he speaks in one group
of connected sentences of the " coming (parousia) of
the Lord " (twice),* of " the name of the Lord " in
which the prophets spoke ; and of " the end of the
Lord," that is, His final dealings with Job. 1 Now
the first phrase must refer to the Lord Jesus 2 and
the second and third to the Lord Jehovah. But
no one could use the same name thrice in such inti-
mate connection without practical identification of
the Lordship referred to in each case. (3) There is
a very interesting phrase which may be paraphrased
thus * : " My brethren, can you, while you keep
showing respect of persons, really hold the faith of
(or * in ') our Lord Jesus Christ, the Glory ? " Let
us examine the phrase.

The Jews spoke much of the glory of Jehovah.
And in the latter days of Israel's religion, when the
dread prevailed of speaking of Jehovah at all, or of
connecting Him closely with earthly things, they
often in the Aramaic, which had taken the place of
the old Hebrew spoke of His Word [Memra], or
His Glory [Yekara], or His abiding [Shekintah or
Shekinah], for reverence sake, instead of speaking
of Himself. So we find it in the Aramaic interpre-
tations of the Hebrew Scripture, which are called
Targums, and which were no doubt, if still unwritten,
yet in familiar use in our Lord's day. " The term
[Shekinah]," says Dr. Box, 4 "together with 'the

1 T 7-1 1. So directly after (v 14) must " the name of the Lord."
1 ii 1, following Hort.
Hastings' Diet, of Christ and the Gospels, a.v. Shekinah.

THE EPISTLE OF JAMES 129

Glory ' and 4 the Word,' is used in the Targums as
an indirect expression in place of God. It denotes
God's visible presence and glorious manifestation,
which dwells among men, the localized presence of
the Deity. . . . The visible Shekinah, though distinct
from the glory, is associated in the closest way with
it. It was conceived of as the centre or source
from which the glory radiated." We understand the
idea, if we think of the words " the glory of the Lord
appeared in the cloud " or the constantly repeated
phrase " the Lord of Hosts which dwelleth between
(or ' sitteth upon ') the cherubim," or " the glory
of the Lord filled the house " (Solomon's temple), or
the phrase of the son of Sirach concerning Ezekiel's
vision : " the vision of glory, which God showed
him upon the chariot of the cherubim." 1 This
thought often explains uses of " glory " in the New
Testament, as when " the glory " is reckoned by
St. Paul among the privileges of Israel, 2 or Stephen
speaks of " the God of the glory," s or the Epistle
to the Hebrews of " the cherubim of glory." It
refers to the manifested or localized presence of God.
Thus either " the Shekinah " or " the Glory " would
be for a Christian Jew a natural expression for our
Lord, conceived of as the visible manifestation of
God among men. Thus when St. John says " The
Word was made flesh and tabernacled among us,
and we beheld his glory," he seems, as has already
been suggested, to be using all three current Jewish
expressions (Memra, Shekinah, Yekara) for the
Incarnate. And when St. Peter speaks of " the
spirit of the Glory and the spirit of God," he seems to
be using " the Glory " as a name of Christ. 4 And

1 Exod. xvi 10, xxv 22, Numb, vii 89, 1 Sam. iv 4, 2 Sam. vi 2,
1 Kings viii 11, Ecclus. xlix 8.

a Rom. ix 4. Acts vii 2.

1 Pet. iv 14 ; cf. 1 Cor. ii 8. Hort and Parry are possibly
right in rendering Tit. ii 13 " The manifestation of the Glory of
our great God and Saviour, that is Jesus Christ."

130 ST. JOHN AND THE REST

I think Dr. Hort must be right in so interpreting
it here in St. James. He calls the Lord Jesus Christ
the Glory, i.e. the visible manifestation of God
among men ; and he would shame those whom
he is addressing out of showing undue respect for
wealthy persons by reminding them that " the Glory "
dwelt among men in the guise of a poor man. On
the whole, then, though James is almost wholly
ethical in his interests and not theological, I think
he indicates that, had he been bound to express
himself, it would have been in the phraseology of
St. Paul or St. John. The presence of his Epistle in
the New Testament may be said to justify a Christi-
anity that is almost purely ethical in its interests,
but not an adoptionist Christology.

The Epistle of Jude, " the brother of James," is
again deeply Jewish, though the Judaism is of a
more apocalyptic type, and it is also predominantly
ethical. " The faith once for all delivered to the
saints " for which he pleaded must have been a
faith which laid its stress on morals. But he seems
to show much more affinity than James with St.
Paul's language. " But ye beloved, building up
yourselves in your most holy faith, praying in the
Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God,
looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ
unto eternal life " is very Pauline phraseology.
And " our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ," is
hardly compatible with any lower Christology than
his.

(c) The First Epistle of Peter

This Epistle must be taken on strong external
evidence as authentic, and on the internal evidence
as written by Peter from Rome, which he calls
Babylon, no doubt very shortly before his martyrdom.
It is a beautiful and gracious document, a real
treasure-house of ethical and spiritual teaching,

THE EPISTLE OF PETER 133

very strongly reminiscent of the Gospels and very
closely akin to St. Paul's ethical teaching. In fact
the Epistle bears such unmistakable suggestions of
the influence of the Epistles to the Romans and the
Ephesians, that we do not expect to find in it any
different theology. St. Peter is plainly at one with
St. Paul.

The Epistle is written to men and women
obviously Gentiles in the main who have been
redeemed by God's infinite mercy out of a corrupt
world and a most evil tradition into " the brother-
hood " the elect body, the only true Israel, royal
and sacerdotal. This brotherhood is now exposed
to obloquy and persecution and is to expect the
hand of judgment more and more severely ; but h
is to bear it joyfully and charitably, looking forward
to the radiant glory in store for them, when the risen
and ascended Lord Jesus Christ is revealed. He is
now at the right hand of God, above all angels and-
spiritual powers, unseen but the object of their
exultant faith. But He is to come. He is at hand
to accomplish the judgment of God and the glory
of His people. Thus the main stress, as in St.
Peter's preaching in the Acts, is on the Lordship of
Jesus at the right hand of God and on His coming.

This passionate faith in Him and expectation of His
coming is the basis of an intensely other-worldly out-
look, but it is the basis none the less of a conception
of a social life to be lived in this world which is te>
compel the attention of those who are without the
elect body. Besides the emphasis laid on the Coming
in Glory there is strong emphasis on the present
redemption from the evil world and atonement with
God which has been wrought by Christ through
His vicarious sacrifice and blood-shedding. 1 We
notice the phrase " through Christ," which implies
His mediatorship, 2 and the phrase "in Christ," 3

1 i 18-21, ii 21 ff., iii 16. ii 5. iv 11. ^ iii 16, v 10, 14,.

132 ST. JOHN AND THE REST

which here, as in St. Paul, implies His universal
hpiritual presence. Again the Lordship of Jesus has
phrases applied to it from the Old Testament (" The
Lord is gracious," " sanctify Christ as Lord in your
hearts ") which were written of Jehovah, the Lord
of hosts. 1 Once more it is probable that in the
phrase " the spirit of the glory and the spirit of
God" (iv 14) Christ is described as " the Glory,"
that is the manifested presence of God the phrase
which we have just considered in connection with
St. James.

When the question is asked whether Peter indicates
the pre-existence of Christ, I think the answer is
that he seems to indicate it, when he calls the spirit
in the old prophets " the Spirit of Christ," and also
when he is talking about the death of Christ and
the condition and activity of His disembodied spirit.
St. Peter speaks very clearly of the (human) spirit
of Jesus as separated from the body in death, and
of its activity in the unseen world ; and he seems to
speak of Christ the person as something distinct
from the human spirit in which He was acting.
He went among the dead, without His human body,
in respect of which He was dead, but in His human
.spirit, which was quickened to a new life. 2

(On the whole I think this Epistle indicates a
mind predominantly ethical and practical and not
theological. But also a mind which was at one with
the theology of St. Paul in its main lines.

The conclusion which we are bound to reach is
that in St. Paul's Epistles and in the Epistle to the
Hebrews and in St. John we get a definite and ex-

1 iii IS^see Is. viii 12-13) and ii 3 (see Ps. xxxiv 8).

2 iii 18-19. This is a point made by Dr. Chase (see Hastings'
Diet, oj the Bible, iii 793). But I cannot agree with him that i 11
Joes not seeua to imply a pre-existcnt Christ.

SUMMARY OF NEW TESTAMENT 133

plicit theology of the Person of Christ as the divine
Son incarnate. The different writers have each
of them his own point of view, but on the whole
their theology is identical. There are other docu-
ments of the New Testament which, taken by them-
selves, give us no clear theology of Christ's person,
but there is nothing in the New Testament which
indicates a rival theology to St. Paul's, or what was
later called an adoptionist Christology. Such a
Christology did appear in the second century in
the Jewish Ebionites and later hi Paul of Samosata.
But it must be held to represent a falling away from
the standpoint which is either energetically main-
tained or implied in all the documents of the New
Testament. We cannot read the Epistle to the
Hebrews which represents to us among a group
of Jewish Christians a " longing, lingering look
behind," and a movement back to the old Judaism
without feeling that a half-instructed Jewish
Christianity must have existed fairly commonly,
and most probably would have existed in Palestine,
which would be very liable to relapse. Accordingly,
it is no surprise to find that a generation later than
the New Testament times such a relapse has occurred,
and that, outside the main streams of Christian life,
there are Christians who hold Christ for a mere man,
assumed by God. But we do not find that position
in the New Testament.

NOTE TO P. 122

Our studious friends, whose intellectual home is with
the German critics, have lately been murmuring in our
ears the name of the Strassburg scholar and philologist,
Richard Reitzenstein, as of one whose theories supply
a^new and powerful explanation of the real origin of
Christian ideas and especially of " Johannine " ideas.
Reitzenstein 1 does in effect suggest that the source of the

1 Richard Reitzenstein'a Poimandres (Leipzig, 1904).
10

134 ST. JOHN AND THE REST

characteristic Johannine ideas and of much else in the
New Testament is to be found in the earliest documents
of the Hermetic literature, which he dates from the
first century of our era. The Hermetic literature he
regards as representing a religious community which
had its source in the identification of Hermes with the
Logos as the revealer of divine wisdom, and with the
Egyptian god Thot, venerated as the founder of Egyptian
wisdom. Hitherto the Hermetic books the revelations
of Hermes Trismegistus have been regarded as an ex-
ample of Graeco-Egyptian syncretism, with Jewish and
Christian elements at work in it, belonging to the third
century, and presupposing the influence of Neo-Platonism;
and Reitzenstein appears to have failed in his attempt to
show cause to date any part of the literature in the first
century. His grounds for assigning it this earlier date
have been subjected by the Roman Catholic scholar,
E. Krebs (Der Logos als Heiland, Freiburg im Breisgau,
1910) to a very searching and careful examination, and
he has shown them to be highly precarious and improb-
able (op. cit., pp. 133 ff. ; cf. Ed. Meyer, Ursprung,ii pp.
56-7). This is the opinion of most of the scholars who
have examined the matter. And the whole conception of
a wide-spreading Hermetic sect or community appears
to be groundless. On the other hand Krebs has again
excellently laid bare the purely Jewish roots of the
ideas of the Fourth Gospel. As I have already said, in
examining the attempt to find a Hellenistic origin for
the faith in Jesus as Lord, and for the institution of
the sacrament of the Lord's Body and Blood, 1 I do not
think anything really lies at the root of the doctrine of
the New Testament except the tradition of the Old
Testament and the new experience which came to the
disciples of Jesus in His teaching and person, His life
and death and resurrection, and the mission of the Spirit.
All the New Testament grew from the Jewish root and
this experience of Jesus, including the Gospel of Paul
and the Gospel of John.

But when you come to the second stage, to the spread
of the Catholic Church, I think the new criticism which
calls our attention to Hellenistic syncretism, and sets the
1 See appended notes to cap. iii.

THE THEORY OF REITZENSTEIX 135

Gnostic movement on its wider background, has much to
teach us. With Christian origins Hellenism has very
little to do. But the atmosphere of the mystery religions
and of Hellenistic theosophy, with its yearning for divine
fellowship and spiritual light and knowledge and salva-
tion and a new birth, and its love of sacramental sym-
bolism and fellowship, has a good deal to do with the
diffusion of the Christian Church. It both provided its
opportunity and constituted in part its peril ; and we
shall have to return upon the modern theory of the in-
fluence of the Hellenistic theosophy and the mystery
religions, when we are dealing with the theory of the
Church and the sacraments in the next volume.

CHAPTER V

THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS

IT is undeniable that the apocalyptic expectation
formed a large element in the faith of the first
Church, and that it was, on the lowest estimate, a
considerable feature in the teaching of Jesus. By
the apocalyptic expectation we mean the expecta-
tion that Jesus, the Christ, who had been crucified
and now was risen and exalted to heaven, was " to
come in glory " to " restore all things " and " to
judge the quick and the dead." x The Church has
long been accustomed to call this " the second
coming " : and it is so referred to once or twice in
the New Testament. 2 But almost always it is called
simply " the coming " or " the presence " of Christ. 3
This is the word common to St. Matthew, St. James,
St. Paul, and St. John. The birth, the ministry,
the passion, the resurrection, the effusion of the
Spirit all these are indeed represented as mo-
ments or stages in His coming. But all these are
viewed as incomplete. Then and then only will
He in an adequate sense have come, when He comes
into His own, or God comes into His own in Him,
in fully manifested glory, so that " every eye shall
see him," and every adverse power shall have been
put under His feet. This is the old fundamental
Jewish hope of the " day of the Lord." And this

1 Acts iii 21, x 42, xvii 31. 8 Heb. ix 28 ; cf. i 6.

3 irapovffia. See Matt, xxiv 3, 27, 37, 39, James v 7-8, 1 These,
ii 19, iii 13, iv 15, etc., 1 John ii 28.

136

THE JEWS' SENSE OF DIVINE PURPOSE 137

had, as we have seen, a very real and undeniable
place in our Lord's own mind and teaching. No
one therefore can think seriously about belief in
Christ without fully facing this belief in the future
coming of Christ in glory. But recently it has come
to be widely and confidently stated and believed
that Jesus Himself anticipated and proclaimed His
immediate coming as the glorified Christ, within
the lifetime of His own generation, and was in this
(as in some other respects) deluded, or the victim
of current ideas which were in fact illusions l ; and
there has been a great deal of discussion of the bearing
of these delusions of the mind of Christ upon the
theology of His person. But we had better, first
of all, see whether there is sufficient reason to attribute
delusions to Him ; and w r e can only effectively do
this if we have in view the Jewish expectation,
Messianic and Apocalyptic, as it was before our
Lord came, and take careful note of the way in which
He both accepted it and also fundamentally altered
its character. Then only can we estimate the justice
with which delusion or mistake is attributed to Him
as regards " the end " and the immediacy of the
end.

The Jews, as we have already seen, 2 were con-
spicuous among the nations of the earth for their
belief (i) in a divine purpose in the whole world,
which was to be progressively realized and finally
consummated, and (ii) in their own race as the divinely
chosen instrument of this universal purpose, as it
was said to Abraham, " In thy seed shall all the

1 This however is of course not a merely recent difficulty for faith.
I remember Professor Henry Sidgwick, shortly before his death in
1900, telling me that it had been a main reason with him for
renouncing orthodoxy forty years before.

Other cases of presumed error in the mind and teaching of Jesus
Christ as regards the existence and activity of Satan and devils,
and as regards the literary character of the Old Testament books
are dealt with below (pp. 189 ff.).

1 See above, pp. 13 ff.

138 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS

families of the earth be blessed." This is the root
of the Messianic hope as the prophets of Israel
announced it ; and it takes shape in the following
forms and features of the hope, which have been
already discussed and will here only be alluded to :

1. That the religion of Israel is finally to win
universal sovereignty and universal recognition.
fc * The mountain of the Lord's house shall be estab-
lished in the top of the mountains and all nations
shall flow unto it. ... Out of Zion shall go forth
the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem." *

2. That Israel is the elect vehicle of this true
religion, and that the anointed king of the family of
David, who is to bear the divine name, and to fulfil
the predestined glory of Israel, is to be the instrument
of this divine supremacy, this Kingdom of God. 2

3. That this Kingdom to come is to be accom-
panied with, or be based upon, a new, more spiritual,
and everlasting covenant between God and His
restored people, 3 and the nations of the world recon-
ciled to Israel.

4. That also it is to be accompanied with an
effusion of the Spirit of God, not only upon the
anointed king, but upon the whole people upon
all flesh. 4

5. That also it must involve a resurrection from
the dead of faithful Israelites who have died, that
they too may participate in the Kingdom ; and
this belief in the resurrection of faithful Israelites
becomes a belief in a resurrection generally of all,
good or evil alike, to glory or shame. 5

6. This sovereignty of God requires for its estab-
lishment the infliction of the judgment of God upon

1 See above, pp. 15 f. * See above, pp. 16-17.

3 See above, p. 18.

4 Is. xi init. and Joel ii 28-9. In Is. xlii and Ixi the Spirit is
poured upon " The Servant," who begins by being the faithful
remnant of the people but seems to become an individual.

6 Is. xxvi 4?. Dan. xii 2.

THE DAY OF THE LORD 139

every insolent and godless power in turn. The
prophets are full of " oracles of Jehovah " upon
Assyria, upon Egypt, upon Babylon, upon Edom,
upon Tyre, upon " the nations " generally. The
prophets announce like judgments upon apostate
and rebellious Israel and Judah ; but on the whole
with a marked difference. The judgments upon
the nations are final and irreversible. 1 The judg-
ment on Israel is, on the other hand, always figured
as a severe and just discipline, out of which at least
a faithful remnant is to emerge to fulfil the destiny
of the chosen people.

7. These particular judgments or dooms on par-
ticular nations are again and again thrown upon
the background of tremendous cosmic catastrophes.
Thus the doom on Babylon (Is. xiii 10-13) has this
background : " The stars of heaven and the con
stellations thereof shall not give their light ; the
sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the
moon shall not cause her light to shine. ... I will
make the heavens to tremble and the earth shall be
shaken out of her place, in the wrath of the Lord
of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger." Or
again the doom on Edom (Is. xxxiv 4-5) is thus
accompanied : " And all the host of heaven shall be
dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled away as
a scroll : and all their host shall fade away, as the
leaf fadeth from off the vine, and as a fading leaf
from off the fig-tree. For my sword hath drunk
its fill in heaven : behold it shall come down upon
Edom ... to judgment." I have chosen these
two quotations because our Lord so precisely repeats
the language of these two passages in His doom
upon Jerusalem.

What did Isaiah mean by such language ? We
know that the Jewish seers and poets often repre-
sent nature as expressing sympathy, even violently,

1 Except in Jeremiah ; see above, p. 16 n. 3.

140 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS

with the redemptive acts of God. " Why hop ye so,
ye high hills ? " " The hills melted like wax at the
presence of the Lord." " The mountains and the
hills shall break forth before you into singing, and
all the trees of the field shall clap their hands."
This is a kind of metaphor which we find in poets
of many nations. It is akin to what Ruskin called
the " pathetic fallacy." It is interesting to learn
that mediaeval Jews in Spain commemorated thus
the death of a certain Rabbi Isaac Alfasi, on May 12,
1103 : " This day was a calamity : it was a day of
misfortune and oppression, a day of darkness and
gloom, a day of cloud and mist, a day when the
heavens and their luminaries were obscured, when
they were clothed with sackcloth. The stars put
on mourning ; the hills bowed ; all Israel w r as
terrified." And another epitaph on Rabbi Jona
from the next century runs : " Son of Sion, before
this stone weep for the sun buried beneath the
dust of the earth ; the firmament was clothed with
darkness, the constellations were ashamed : the
moon blushed ; on the day when the glory and
crown of the Law was buried." l Here we have,
no doubt, nothing but conscious metaphor. All
that is really meant is that two Rabbis died deeply
regretted, and that nature must have sympathized
with the sorrow of the Jews.

But though such expressions as Isaiah uses may be
conscious metaphors, they are not mere metaphors.
They mean at least that in the prophet's vision the
physical world served the moral purpose of God,
and might at any moment be expected to express it.
And in the latter days of prophecy, when the triumph
of Israel over the nations seemed more and more
impossible by natural means, apocalyptic seers
more and more clearly anticipate cosmic catastrophe

1 See Lagrange, Le Messianisme chez les Juifs (Paris, 1909),
pp. 49-50.

THE LATER APOCALYPSES 141

wrought by God in His omnipotence to end the
present world order, and usher in " a new heaven
and a new earth."

So we get the idea of an " end of the world "
followed by a " world to come," in the later literature.
But in all the books of the Old Testament, and indeed
in the New Testament, it appears to be always
in some sense this world which emerges, renovated
through cataclysm, as the sphere of the Kingdom
of God. 1 Only in some of the later uncanonical
Apocalypses, which seem in this respect to exhibit
influences from Persia, this world seems to be wholly
obliterated at the last day or wholly left behind,
and an altogether " other*" world takes its place.
' The earth however purged and purified is no
fitting scene for an eternal kingdom. . . . God's
habitation and that of the blessed must be built
not of things earthly and corruptible, but of things
heavenly and incorruptible." 2 But enough has

1 This will be obvious to anyone who will read Is. xxiv seemingly
a late prophecy incorporated in Isaiah where, after " the earth is
utterly broken, the earth is clean dissolved," etc., it still appears
that Mount Zion and Jerusalem stand as the centre of the divine
kingdom. So it is again in Joel ii after the cataclysm of verses
30, 31 (see verse 32 and iii 1 and 16-21). So in Daniel vii 13
the sovereignty of the " one like unto a son of man who came
with the clouds of heaven " and was given universal dominion by
the " Ancient of Days " which is interpreted immediately as the
rule of the saints of the Most High, that is of faithful Israel
is still, like the previous sovereignties of the " great beasts," that
is the godless powers which it supplants, a sovereignty on this
earth (see verses 21-7).

And if the matter is frankly considered we must admit that the
expectation of the New Testament is still that of a return of Christ
to earth, a heavenly kingdom to come on earth though it be a
new heaven and a new earth a new Jerusalem which is to come
down from heaven as God's final dwelling-place among men (see,
e.g., Acts iii 20-21 ; 1 Thess. iv 16 ; Rom. viii 20-22). In 2 Peter
iii the day of judgment by fire is conceived of on the analogy of
the earlier judgment by water : both judgments are represented
as destroying an old world and bringing a new one into existence
which is still only the old one purged and renewed. So also in the
Revelation.

1 Charles, Between the Old and New Testaments, pp. 66-7.

142 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS

been said about this already. Where this is so,
the Messianic Kingdom, in the old Jewish sense,
becomes very difficult to adjust to this " other world."
It is either ignored altogether or becomes a rather
meaningless temporary prelude to the Last Day.

The influence of these later Apocalypses has of
recent years been much exaggerated. We have
already had occasion to argue that all the literature
of the New Testament tends to show that in
our Lord's day the hope of the Messiah and His
Kingdom was on the lines of the old prophetic hope
of the King of David's line, who should restore the
kingdom to Israel, whether this hope was more
spiritually conceived, as it is represented in the open-
ing chapters of St. Luke's Gospel, or was entertained
on nationalist and militarist lines as by the mass
of the people. When John the Baptist preached
the Kingdom and the Christ as at hand, he sought
to spiritualize the people's conception of what was
coming, as being something so holy and awful as
that only a new Israel, changed and purified in
heart, could meet it; but this was only to renew
the warnings of the old prophets. There is nothing
in John the Baptist's teaching to suggest the later
Apocalypses. 1

What we have now to discover is the sense in
which Christ both accepted and also transformed
the old Messianic teaching.

To go back, then, to the headings under which
we summarized the Jewish hope, and to deal very
briefly with the earlier ones, (1) it must be granted
that our Lord, while accepting the limitation of
His own mission on earth to His own people, pro-
claimed a Gospel of the Kingdom which, having its
roots in the Jewish religion (for " salvation is
of the Jews " 2 ), is now to become world-wide.

1 Matt, iii 10-12 suggests no more than Mai. iii 2, 3, iv 1.

2 John iv. 22. But the idea underlies all the Gospels.

HIS MESSIANIC CLAIM 143

The sayings " The gospel must first be preached
unto all nations," " Wherever the gospel shall
be preached throughout the whole world," 1 the
authenticity of which cannot reasonably be doubted,
are enough to show this. And at the beginning
of His mission, in the account of the Temptations,
it is evident that the last temptation 2 would have
no meaning except as addressed to one who in some
sense was contemplating world- wide dominion.

(2) It does not seem to have been disputed that
our Lord could rightly claim to be of the family of
David, as being the reputed son of Joseph, and He
certainly acknowledged Himself to be the Christ ;
but it is plain that, in taking the title of " the Son
of Man " and identifying it with the Suffering Servant
of Jehovah, and criticizing for its inadequacy the
current notion of the Christ as the son of David, He
was turning His back in the most marked way on
the Messianic hope, both as it was held in nationalist
circles and as held among the Pharisees. He accepted,
but He transformed in meaning, the Messiah's
kingdom, so as to make it, in the most disconcerting
sense, a kingdom not of this world.

(3) He solemnly, at the Last Supper at least,
proclaimed the New Covenant as established in
His blood. 3

(4) As He declared Himself anointed and possessed
by the Spirit, 4 so He led his disciples to expect His
effusion upon them, at some definite moment after
His departure, and the coming of the Spirit on the
Day of Pentecost was at once identified as in some
sense the coming of the Day of the Lord. 5

1 Mark xiii 10, xiv 9. Matt, iv 8. 8 See above, p. 101.

4 See Luke iv 1, 18, 21. There is very little teaching about the
Holy Spirit ascribed to our Lord in the Synoptists. But St. Luke
is explicit in xxiv 49 and Acts i 5, 8. And it is, I think, impossible
to doubt, in view of the belief of the first disciples, that teaching
like that of John xiv to xvi must have been given by Him.

6 Acts ii 17-18.

144 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS

(5) Our Lord is represented in all the Gospels as
constantly foretelling not His death only but also
His resurrection : and the resurrection of the dead
was, as we have seen, to be one of the signs that the
Kingdom was come. 1

Here then let us pause a moment. If it be agreed,
as I think it should be, that our Lord, while He
accepted the Messianic expectation, profoundly
spiritualized it, declaring the " Kingdom of God "
to be a kingdom of righteous men, such as must
have its roots in the wills and hearts of men, and needs
to be spiritually discerned, and is in actual process
of establishment 2 ; and if further He took three
recognized notes of the Kingdom, the New Covenant
of God with His people, and the Resurrection of the
Dead, and the effusion of the Spirit, and led His
disciples to expect the realization of these notes
in the immediate future that is in His own death
and the immediately following events if this be
so, then there was certainly a sense in which He
viewed the Kingdom as coming immediately. Thus
when we find Him saying " Verily I say unto you,
There be some here of them that stand by, which
shall in no wise taste of death till they see the King-
dom of God come with power," 3 and again, before
His Jewish judges, " Henceforth (not ' hereafter ' as
in our old Bible, but ' henceforth ') ye shall see the

1 St. Paul, in Horn, i 4, speaks of Christ's resurrection as " the
resurrection of dead men " i.e. it was the first-fruits and assurance
of the general resurrection. There are several indications in the
N.T. of this point of view.

* See Mark vii 15 ff., Luke xvii 20, 21, John iii 3.

8 Mark ix 1, Luke ix 27, where the words "come with power "
are omitted. In Matt, xvi 28 it stands " till they see the Son of
Man coming in his kingdom." There was a tendency in St. Matthew
to put all these prophecies in the form most suggestive of a visible
coming of the glorified Christ. But where the reports differ in
detail, one thing is quite certain we cannot be sure of the very
words of Christ on the particular occasion.

THE KINGDOM TO COME lio

Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and
coming on the clouds of heaven " 1 (as in the vision
of Daniel), we shall be disposed to find the fulfilment
of these prophecies in the early chapters of the Acts.
There we are given a picture of the little community
of disciples absorbed in the sense of their Lord as
already exalted by God's right hand and to God's
right hand, and as acting upon them and through
them with power from heaven, though there was a
further coming to be expected. And so impressed
were " the brethren " with the divine power working
through the apostles that they regarded them,
even in their own community, as a class apart.
" Of the rest durst no man join himself to them :
howbeit the (Jewish) people magnified them."
The disciples would have felt that they already saw
the Twelve, according to Christ's promise, " sitting
on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel."

1 Here Mark gives only " Ye shall see " (xiv 62). But both
Matt, xxvi 64 and Luke xxii 69 give us the " henceforth " (air' &pri
or ark rov vvv). In St. Luke the words are " From henceforth
shall the Son of man be seated at the right hand of the power
of God." But whatever the exact words, our Lord is recalling
the vision hi Daniel vii of one " like unto a Son of man coming
with the clouds of heaven."

I do not think there is any need to suppose our Lord in these
places to be citing the Book of Enoch. Daniel vii 13 satisfies all
the requirements of the quotations. There is an excellent paper of
the late Dr. Moorhouse, Bishop of Manchester, entitled Did Our Lord
Jesus Christ share the Popular Opinions of the Jews on Eschatoloyy ?
(which he circulated but, as far as I know, did not publish), in
which he answers his question in the negative, or in the sense that
He " transmuted " the popular Apocalyptic. He says, and, I
think, in the main, truly : " There is good reason to believe that
our Lord invariably took his apocalyptic imagery, not from the
later apocryphal writings, but from the books of the canonical
prophecies." But I have argued above that our Lord's language
assumes that the figure in Daniel had been already recognized as
an individual person such as can be identified with the Messiah,
and this identification probably came from Enoch.

8 Acts v 12. See Rackham in loc.

* See Luke xxii 30.

146 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS

Already the community of believers in Jesus as the
Christ was the real Israel, and the Apostles were its
princes, and Christ was not only reigning in glory
in heaven but was so manifested on earth in judg-
ments and wonderful works.

(6) But we have still to consider the two last
headings (6 and 7) of the Messianic expectations, and
first that of judgment on the hostile, godless powers.
Our Lord, then, certainly, like the old prophets, pro-
nounces a doom on a* hostile power, but in this case
the hostile power is the chosen people itself, who in
their rejection of the Christ have shown themselves
the enemies of God.

This is plainly the meaning of the parable of the
vineyard l which appears in all three Synoptic
Gospels. The sin of Israel has been consummated
in the rejection of the Son of God, and God will
come in judgment to destroy these unfaithful agents
(I suppose the Jewish rulers in particular), and give
His spiritual possession in charge to othersdoubt-
less the " little flock " to whom Jesus said " It is
your Father's good pleasure to give you the king-
dom." 2 The same doom is recorded to have been
pronounced with passionate anguish at the end of
the woes upon the scribes and Pharisees in
St. Matthew. " O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . .
Behold your house is left unto you desolate," 3 and,
in St. Luke, with bitter tears when Jesus beheld
the city and wept over it. 4 St. Paul, we notice,
entertained no doubt that the doom on Jerusalem
was irreversible " wrath is come upon them to
the uttermost." 5

But, of course, the most detailed judgment on
Jerusalem is in what is called our Lord's apocalyptic

1 Mark xii 9. * Luke xii 32.

8 Matt, xxiii 37-8. It is possible that verso 39 was pronounced
before the entry into Jerusalem.

Luke xix 41 ff. 6 1 Thesa. ii 15-16.

THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM 147

discourse given in St. Mark xiii, 1 and the parallel
passage in the other Gospels. There we read how
our Lord had His attention called by one of His
disciples to the magnificence of the temple buildings,
and makes it the opportunity for denouncing upon
them speedy and complete ruin. Then when the
inner circle of disciples asks Him when this is to
happen and what sign is to presage the disaster, 2
our Lord describes a time of spiritual confusion,
political unrest, and physical calamity, which is
to be expected before the judgment falls. 3 And
He warns the apostles that they are to find not
only the Jewish rulers but the world powers arrayed
against them in their task of preaching the Gospel
unto all the nations, and that they are to be objects
of universal hatred, and to be subjected to the
severest strain. Then, when they see an awful
profanation of the Holy Place occurring, such as
is obscurely described in the Book of Daniel, the
disciples who are in Judaea are to escape from the
doomed city at once, without a moment's delay,
and flee to the mountains. A scene of unparalleled
horror is to be expected from which they shall barely
escape, and the physical horrors shall be made more

1 The critics have largely accepted the view that a considerable
part of the discourse (verses 7-8, 12, 14, 17-22, 24-7, 30) was
not pronounced by our Lord but was a " little apocalypse " due
to some prophet near the time of the destruction of Jerusalem
about A.D. 66 and is the " oracle " which Eusebius (H.E. iii 5,
apparently on the authority of Hegesippus) declares to have warned
the Christiana of Jerusalem to escape and remove to Pella, a city
of Peraea. I do not see sufficient reasons for adopting this view.
The " oracle " referred to by Eusebius may have been simply a
warning that now was the moment to act on the Lord's admonition,
given to a few disciples privately nearly forty years before, and
carefully treasured in writing by the Jerusalem Church as its secret.
This would account for St. Mark here using a written document,,
as he seems to do (see verse 14)

8 In Matthew the question is made to concern both the destruction
and (as a separate event) the end of the world. St. Matthew tends
generally to heighten the apocalyptic colouring of our Lord's dis-
courses. We cannot doubt that St. Mark rightly records their?
question. Appended note, p. 160.

LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLFGF

148 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS

trying by the seductions of false Christs and false
prophets (verses 5-23). There are to follow " in
those days, after that tribulation," portents in the
heavens described in the words of Isaiah darkened
sun and moon, falling stars, shaken heavens, and also
what has no counterpart in Isaiah- the coming
of the Son of Man in power and glory, accompanied
with angels whom He will send to gather together
His scattered people from all quarters of the world
(verses 24-7). Then we are taken back to the time
of preparation, and the disciples are warned of the
certainty of the doom, and that this generation
shall see it accomplished (verses 30-31). Then, in
what appears to be sudden contrast, we hear of a
certain day and hour (" that day " and " that hour ")
which is veiled in complete uncertainty, of which
even the Son has no knowledge ; and the discourse
as it stands ends with a warning to them, couched
in a parable, that, though their Lord after
His departure should seem to delay His return,
they are always to watch, for it will be sudden,
when it comes, and they know not when to expect
it (32-7).

The main purpose of this discourse apart from
its warnings of the spiritual trials which our Lord's
apostles are to expect is to declare explicitly and
with imaginative * detail, such as we are familiar
with in the " judgments " of the old prophets, the
certain doom upon Jerusalem to be accomplished
, before " this generation had passed away." This
was a definite prophecy, and it was fulfilled in A.D. 70,
; amidst unimaginable horrors.

(7) But this doom upon Jerusalem is thrown, after
the manner of the ancient prophets, and in the

1 The details appear to be details of the picture, as presented
to their imagination, rather than detailed prophecy of circum-
stances. Thus the Christians of Jerusalem did not "flee to the
mountains," but over the Jordan and just across it to Pella, opposite
southern Galilee.

THE END OF THE WORLD 149

words of Isaiah, upon a background of cosmic por-
tents darkened sun and moon, falling stars, shaken
heavens, heralding the coming of the Son of Man as
described in the vision of Daniel, but now as coming
to earth to fulfil what had always been associated
in prophecy with the Messianic kingdom that is,
the gathering of the true Israelites from all the
quarters of the globe. 1 And there are other passages
in which our Lord is recorded to have spoken of the
coming of the Christ in glory to wind up the present
world history in scathing judgment and abundant
blessing, in phrases which are based upon Daniel's
vision but assume that the figure of " one like to
a son of man " has been already identified with the
Christ, 2 and the final Day of Judgment a familiar
prospect. The distinctive scenery of the day of
judgment is more prominent in St. Matthew's
accounts of our Lord's discourses than in those of
the other Evangelists. But it is not, I think, possible
to doubt that our Lord did not merely describe the
destruction of Jerusalem in terms of celestial portents,
after the manner of Isaiah, but did throw this
judgment upon the background of the great and
universal Day of Judgment with the glorified Christ
for judge, thus adopting the latter apocalyptic
imagery.

In what sense, we ask ? Well, it seems to me
that any believer in the God of the prophets and
of our Lord must believe with them in a Day of
God, as bringing the present age, or human history,
to its climax. God, for all His long tolerance of
human wilfulness and arrogance, must one day
come into His own in His whole creation, and every-
thing must be seen in its true light as what it is

1 Dent, xxx 3, Jer. xxiii 3, xxxii 37, Ezek. xxxiv 13, etc.

3 Such passages are Matt, xiii 40-41, the conclusion of the
parable of the Tares, Matt, xvi 27, Mark viii 38, Luke ix 26,
Matt, xxv 31 ff., Luke xii 40 and 46, xix 15, John v 28. The first
Church was plainly full of this xpectation.
11

150 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS

really worth. That is the " day of judgment " in
its essence. And no believer in Christ can doubt
that this final disclosure of things as they really
are will be the manifested victory of Christ. His
judgment on men and things will be shown to be
the final judgment and the judgment of God. And
this Day, like all the preparatory and partial " days
of judgment," will speak the divine doom on all
corrupt civilizations and godless and inhuman forms
of power and institutions of cruelty and lust, and
on all rebels against God and right, only now
not partially and locally, but universally, in the
whole created world. We cannot, it seems to me,
hold any conception of progress which is con-
sistent with the facts of experience, without recog-
nizing that the divine purpose of progress works
through cataclysms as well as gradually, and that the
final coming of the Kingdom (if such an expectation
is entertained) must involve a cataclysm also on
the vastest scale. It seems to me quite certain
that our Lord enforces this doctrine, and that
He clothed this moral certainty in the tremendous
imagery of the rending clouds, and the descending
form, and the throne and the angels, and the
judgment spoken on every soul. Certainly our
Lord was ready enough to use imagery, and knew
well enough how to distinguish symbolism from
literal language. I cannot doubt that His picture
of the Last Day is the clothing of an awful reality
in symbolic forms. Only let us agree that our
Lord, in this solemn imagery, did affirm that human
history would reach its climax in what would be
at once the coming of the Kingdom in full glory
and the final Day of Judgment, and threw upon
this background the immediate judgment on
Jerusalem.

But now we come back to the question mentioned
at starting this enquiry did our Lord declare that

THE COMING OF THE END 151

the Last Day would follow immediately on the Fall
of Jerusalem, and did He in this respect show Him-
self to be under the influence of a current apocalyptic
expectation, and in fact mistaken ?

There was certainly, I think, mistake somewhere.
St. Matthew with his " immediately " (xxiv 29) must
be interpreted as meaning that the great day would
follow the destruction of Jerusalem as a separate
event without any considerable interval. And, in
the sense intended, this certainly did not occur.
But St. Mark's words are vaguer, "in those days,
after that tribulation " (xiii 24), and St. Luke
suggests an interval of indefinite length : " Jerusalem
shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times
of the Gentiles be fulfilled " (xxi 24). Plainly we
cannot rely upon having the precise words of Christ,
and we seem to detect contrary tendencies in St.
Matthew and St. Luke in St. Matthew to accentuate
everything apocalyptic in our Lord's words, and in
St. Luke to minimize. If we are to form a sound
judgment we must look at the general tenour of our
Lord's teaching as a whole, and not lay stress upon
single phrases in one Gospel.

I would say then that the extreme apocalyptic
estimate of Christ formed (for example) by Schweitzer
must certainly be rejected. He represents the
Christ of current Judaism as simply the Heavenly
Figure of Daniel and Enoch. He would have us be-
lieve that there was no question of our Lord while
on earth being the Christ already. It was simply
that He believed Himself, and was believed by
others, to be destined to be the Christ from heaven.
But that estimate alike of current Jewish belief
and of the special belief concerning Jesus is, as has
already been shown, quite contrary to the evidence.
Holding this mistaken or very one-sided idea of
the Messianic expectation, Schweitzer maintains
that our Lord, when He first sent out the Twelve

152 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS

expected to come as Christ in the clouds of heaven
(without dying) before their brief mission was ended, 1
and that He had no idea of promoting any Kingdom
of God in the world or establishing (what is the
same thing) any new way or order of life among
men. All His rapt attention was on the Last Day
and the other world, as to come within the next
few weeks. When He was disappointed about this,
His disappointment, and the warning of the execution
of John the Baptist, taught Him to think that He
should offer Himself for death and that His sacri-
ficial death would certainly move God to bring the
kingdom from heaven at once.

All this picture of our Lord is surely violently
one-sided and distorted. Our Lord assuredly pro-
claimed a kingdom of God, characterized by a new
vision of God and a new conception of righteousness,
which in one sense was already in being a kingdom
of God established in the hearts of men already
within men or among them. 2 Again, He certainly
spoke of the growth of the kingdom under the figure
of the growth of a plant and the diffusion of leaven ;
and again, as a mixed society on earth, which only

1 This is founded on Matt, x 23: "But when they persecute
you in the city, flee unto the next : for verily I say unto you, Ye
shall not have gone through the cities of Israel, till the Son of man
be come." But the whole of this section in St. Matthew, verses
16-23, appears to be antedated. It belongs properly to the prepara-
tion by Christ of the apostles for their experiences after He was
gone from them. (See Mark xiii 9-13, and Luke xxi 12-19.) The
particular words quoted, which do not appear in St. Mark or St.
Luke, probably in their original context meant " Never stay any-
where to press the Gospel on those who do not want it. There
will always be unevangelized places to be given their chance before
tho Gospel is preached in the whole world and the end comes."
I think we must conclude that St. Matthew, in adapting the words
to a much earlier situation a preliminary mission of the Twelve
exclusively to Jews has given them a misleading appearance.
At any rate, whatever the words may be held to mean, it is an
unreasonable thing to accentuate a solitary and unsupported saying
so as to give to Jesus an appearance of being such a fanatic as is
quite out of character with the general tone of His teaching.

1 Luke xvii 20 ; cf. Matt, xi 12, xiii 44-6.

ST. LUKE AND ST. JOHN 153

at the final day could be completely purified. 1 He
certainly prepared His " little flock " to become the
New Israel, and therefore (in some sense) the kingdom
of God on earth. 2 Again, He certainly spoke of a
preaching of the Gospel of the kingdom throughout
the whole world, 3 and He must have known, He who
was supremely sane, that this must be an affair of
a long time. Moreover, He speaks again and again
of the strain upon courage and faith involved in
waiting while God seems to de nothing this under
the figure of the man of property wh* left the ad-
ministration of his property to others and went
away "for a long time," and in other similar
parables 4 ; and He asked the startling question :
44 When the Son of man cometh, shall he find the faith
on the earth ? " 5 or will the strain have been too
much for it ? It is plain that St. Luke is aware of a
tendency to misrepresent our Lord (as he thinks) as
having prophesied an immediate end, and desires to
correct it. 6

Also we cannot ignore the teaching of the Fourth
Gospel. The final coming is there, and in the First
Epistle of St. John, still the object of expectation. 7
But the writer also plainly thinks it his business to
remind the Church that the apocalyptic expecta-
tion was not the whole of our Lord's teaching, nor
(in his eyes) its most important element. Christ
also prepared for the establishment of His kingdom
here and now in the world, by the sending of His
Spirit, which was also His own return by the Spirit.

Thus, on the whole, we seem to me to have every

1 Mark iv 30, Matt, xiii 33, 47-50, 52.

8 That is to say, He refoimded the Church. But this is reserved
for argument in the next volume. 3 Mark xiii 10, xiv 9.

4 Matt, xxv 19 ; cf. Luke xix 12, " into a far country."

5 Luke xviii 8.

6 Luke xix 12. "Because they supposed that the Kingdom of
Cod was immediately to appear."

7 John v 28-9, vi 39, 40, 54 (" the last day "), xi 24, xii 48, xxi
22-3 ; 1 John ii 28, iii 2, 2 John 7.

154 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS

reason to believe that our Lord's teaching about
the coming of the kingdom was much more com-
plex and many-sided than the apocalyptic school
acknowledges. He accepted, but He transmuted,
the apocalyptic hope. He prophesied an immediate
coming by the Spirit. He prophesied a speedy
coming in judgment on Jerusalem. He also threw
this "doom" upon the background of a final coming
or Day of Judgment. No doubt the first disciples
expected this final day immediately, and the ex-
pectation has coloured the report of our Lord's
words in St. Matthew and perhaps somewhat in
St. Mark also. But it is in both these Gospels that
we read the indisputably authentic words of Christ :
" Of that day and that hour knoweth no one, not
the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but
the Father." This certainly means that our Lord
had not at least in His mortal state a map of
the future spread before Him. We should take
these words in connection with those recorded of
our Lord by St. Luke, before His ascension, in
answer to a question of the disciples, which shows
them still clinging to the old Jewish hope in its
fallacious form : " Dost thou at this time restore
the kingdom to Israel ?" " He said unto them,
It is not for you to know times or seasons which
the Father hath set within his own authority." l
These last two sayings mean, I think, unmistakably
that our Lord gave no teaching at all upon the time
of the end. He left it wholly vague and indefinite.
Thus, we must, on reviewing the whole evidence,
give a negative answer to the question whether our
Lord was mistaken about the time of the end. I
think we have seen cogent reasons for saying that
our Lord refused to give any teaching on the subject,
and declared it not to be within the scope of His
knowledge, as He then was. There was mistake

1 Acts i 6, 7.

ST. PAUL'S EXPECTATION 155

but it was on the part of the disciples, and not of our
Lord ; and we have, I think, to admit that it has
somewhat discoloured some expressions, especially in
the first of the Synoptic Gospels, but not sufficiently
to prevent our correcting the discolouring out of
the total impression left us.

I think, also, that this answer to the question is
the one suggested by the attitude of the disciples,
especially St. Paul, in the matter. Plainly he at
first shared the expectation of the end within his
own lifetime, 1 and plainly also he grew out of it 2
not out of the expectation, but out of its immediacy
simply by the growth of his experience and re-
flection, and without any shock. It would appear
as if the expectation was to him not an " article
of faith " and not something for which he had a
word of Christ. Otherwise there would have been
the sense of shock. And St. Paul's attitude is
reflected in that of the whole Church. Jerusalem
fell by wholly natural means, but according to
the prophecy of Jesus : yet " the end " did not
come. Then we find the seer of the Apocalypse
making another prophecy. The hostile power is
now not the apostate Israel but the Roman Empire
turned persecutor ; and the seer pronounces upon
it the doom of God, and again throws that doom
upon the background of the End. The Church, we
gather, like St. Paul, had experienced no shock in
seeing that the Day of God did not " immediately "
follow, as they had expected, the doom on Jerusalem.
They prepared to see another doom on another
hostile power, persecuting Rome, and again to throw
it upon the background of the final and universal
judgment.

This represents the attitude which our Lord would
have His disciples take. Because they believe in
God, they must take it for granted that in no

1 1 Thess. iv 14, 1 Cor. xv 51. * Phil, i 23, 2 Tim. iv 6.

156 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS

department can evil be ifinally victorious. The end
is certain and is to be eagerly expected. God must
come into His own. That is ' k the day of the Lord,"
or " day of judgment." In the world's history there
are many days of judgment. Over long periods in-
deed God seems to do nothing and the world-power
to have it all its own way. But there are also days
when the world-power seems to be cracking and
dissolving, and then it falls. God has bared His
arm. Sooner or later the judgment of God falls
" naturally " on every institution which ignores,
persistently and defiantly, the law of righteousness.
" Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles
be gathered together." Thus we have many " last
days," l or " days of extremity," followed by " days of
the Lord." But all these days of the Lord, of which
the Bible record is full, are the prelude of something
final and universal the Day after which God is
to be all in all. Of the date of this we know, and
are to know, nothing, and of its character and manner
of coming we hear only in apocalyptic imagery and
symbolism, as a reflection in a mirror, or in a riddle.
Only we know it is certain to come, and as we belong
already to the kingdom of God we most passionately
and eagerly desire to see it fully consummated.

It is from such a point of view as this that, though
it is going somewhat out of our way, we can attempt
a brief answer to the question which is continually
being raised afresh, whether Christianity is a religion
of this world or an other-worldly religion whether
Christians are to labour for the gradual upbuilding
of the city of God on earth by the transformation
both of individual characters and human institu-

1 I think Westcott (on 1 John ii 18), and Hort (on 1 Peter i 5),
and Parry (on 2 Tim. iii 1) are right in distinguishing " the last
day" from 4< laet days "and "a last hour." "There is clearly a
distinction to be drawn, according as the article is used or not."

THIS WORLD OR THE NEXT ? 157

tions. or whether they are to look forward to the
destruction of this wicked world and all that belongs
to it, and the perfecting of man's hopes in a quite
different world called heaven ?

The problem is generally stated in somewhat mis-
leading terms as an alternative but there can be
no question that for a very long period of time
popular religion has contented itself in the main
with the latter expectation : and that the apathy
of religious people in the face of social injustice
all that has given point to the charge that
"religion has been the opium of the poor" has
been due in great measure to the hold that this
idea has had on the religious imagination. But I
think that any frank consideration of the New
Testament will lead us to the conclusion that the
New Testament, as well as the Old, is on the other
side. 1 There the aim is that the kingdom of God
should come " on earth as it is in heaven." 2 The
end is always pictured as the Return of Christ in
glory and triumph from heaven to earth with the
angels and saints all the treasures of heaven to be
fused with a purged and renewed earth : it is the
redemption of " the whole creation " : it is the
New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven
to be God's dwelling-place upon the " new earth "
and under the " new heaven " : it is " the kingdom
of the world " made "the kingdom of the Lord and
of his Christ." We will not concern ourselves with

1 See above, p. 141 n. 1, with references. I find in Hastings' Diet,
f tfie Bible, art. " Heaven " : "In the N.T. the heaven which is
to be our final home and the goal of our hope is a heaven that is
above this world and beyond time, not only superterrestrial, but
supramundane, the transcendent heaven which is brought to light
in the Gospel " (p. 323). This seems to me a quite remarkably
perverted statement.

2 It would be an immense gain if Christians in general could be
brought to realize that in the Lord's Prayer the words "in earth as it
is hi heaven " refer to all three previous clauses, and if the Lord's
Prayer were printed and recited so as to make this evident.

158 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS

the question of the meaning to be attached to the
preliminary millennium of the Apocalypse. But there
can be no question, I think, that the ultimate king-
dom is in the New Testament, on the whole, figured
not only as including this world, purged by scathing
judgment, but in some sense as centring upon it.
Let us allow as fully as possible that all the language
about the last things is highly figurative : never-
theless it is intended to impress and affect our
imagination, and it makes the greatest possible dif-
ference if our imagination becomes rightly coloured
if what we come to anticipate with assurance is
not our being carried away to some other remote
world, but the victory of God in the creation and
world that we know.

And not only is this the truth about the end of
the world, but it is also true that the Church
which is the old Israel renewed and refounded by
Christ is, or is the representative of, the kingdom
of God on earth here and now, albeit not yet per-
fected, 1 the kingdom which is "righteousness, peace,
and joy in the Holy Spirit." So the ethics of the New
Testament are predominantly social ethics the ethics
of brotherhood ; its discipline is primarily moral
discipline. The aim of the Church is to show here
and now the true human fellowship realized in Christ.
It is bound to make war, in the name of Christ, on
all injustice as much as on all impurity. It must
take all human life for its province. It must de-
velop its philosophy, its art, its principles of social
economy. It exists in the world, but not of the
world, and that means that it must vigorously and
combatively maintain the true principles of human
brotherhood and human life against " the lusts of the
flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life "
that is, against the social aims and practices of
the selfish, avaricious, and lustful world. This seems

1 " Non adhuc regnat hoc regnum," St. Augustine says.

THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT 159

to me indisputable. The only question which remains
to answer is whether the idea of a gradually and
progressively realized kingdom of God in this world

a Church gradually appropriating the world, and
consequently a world progressing towards perfection

is to oust the apocalyptic idea of a Christ manifested
in cataclysm and judgment at the end whether the
two conceptions are mutually exclusive. Many of
our Christian socialists appear to think so, and among
the radical reconstructors of the Gospel men as unlike
one another as Harnack and Schweitzer take it for
granted that the apocalyptic hope is gone beyond
recall and for good.

But I think we must not accept as mutually
exclusive alternatives the idea of a progressive
realization of the kingdom here and now and the
apocalyptic hope. Both seem to me to find their
place in the teaching and mind of Christ ; and both
seem to me to be equally warranted by experience
and needed for the equipment of human souls all
down the generations. We are to labour for the
establishment of the kingdom of God in the name of
Christ and in the power of His Spirit here and now.
But neither Christ nor experience warrants us in
believing that we are to see the extinction of the
power of evil within the present world order. Pro-
gress, as we recognize to-day, is an exceedingly
fitful and chequered process. There is no security
against the collapse of civilizations and Churches.
The powers of evil do not seem to be worn out or to
be weakened only to take new shapes. Now, as
of old, there appears to be the most fearful waste
of the best human efforts. It seems to me that
Jesus Christ would prepare us for all this by the
apocalyptic, other-worldly hope. He would have us
believe that no good effort for the cause of truth
and righteousness will ever really be lost. Their
" works follow with " the suffering servants who

160 THE APOCALYPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS

seem to die defeated, but " in the Lord." With
them (or in them) the fruits of what they have thought
and done and suffered are gathered into the treasury
of God in the heavenly world unseen, and one day
we shall see them with our eyes. We shall see the
fruit of all true human effort integrated in the perfect
fellowship, when Christ comes again when the City
of God descends. But we are not led to expect the
City of God as the culmination of a gradually pro-
gressive movement to perfection. The present world
order will always present the aspect of a more or less
desperate struggle. It is on the other side of Arma-
geddon that the City of God will appear. And that
final battle will be won, as it seems, by the pure act
of God, and the New Jerusalem will appear from
heaven, so that we cannot imagine that we have
fashioned it.

This is metaphorical teaching or symbolism, no
doubt : but only in metaphor or symbol can we
envisage the truth about the future. And the
apocalyptic metaphors, which possess the hearts of
men in days of seeming moral disaster, correspond,
we may be persuaded, with spiritual realities.

NOTE TO P. 147.

An Illustration from Tacitus

It is instructive to read, in connection with Mark xiii
7-13, Tacitus' introduction to his Histories, in which
he is to describe the events of A.D. 68-70, and amongst
them the Jewish War and the capture of Jerusalem,
from the point of view of the Roman Empire : " The
story I now commence is rich in vicissitudes, grim with
warfare, torn by civil strife, a tale of horror even during
times of peace. It tells of four emperors slain by the
sword, three several civil wars, an even larger number of
foreign wars, and some that were both at once. . . . Now,
too, Italy was smitten with new disasters, or disasters
which it had not witnessed for a long period of years.

FROM TACITUS 161

Towns along the rich coast of Campania were submerged
or buried. The city was devastated by fires, ancient
temples were destroyed, and the Capitol itself was fired
by Roman hands. Sacred rites were profaned, and
there were adulteries in high places. The sea swarmed
with exiles, and the cliffs were red with blood. Worse
horrors reigned in the city. . . . Slaves were bribed
against their masters, freedmen against their patrons,
and if a man had no enemies he was ruined by his
friends. . . ." Then, after describing some better
features of the life of the time, he continues : " Besides
these manifold disasters to mankind there were portents
in the sky and on the earth, and the warnings of thunder-
bolts, a premonition of good and of evil, some doubtful,
some obvious. Indeed, never has it been proved by
such terrible disasters to Rome or such clear evidence
that the Gods were concerned not with our safety but
with vengeance on our sins."

CHAPTER VI

IS THE DOCTRINE OF THE INCARNATION TRUE ?

THUS far we have been pursuing a purely historical
method. Thus, after duly taking into account the dis-
tinctively Jewish background of beliefs and expecta-
tions in which the faith in Jesus had its origin (cap. i),
we occupied ourselves in tracing the growth of the
idea of His person as it appears in the New Testament.
We began from the first undefined belief of the
Twelve, which the scandal of the Cross temporarily
overthrew (cap. ii) but which revived under the ex-
perience of the Resurrection and the coming of the
Spirit and took shape in the enthusiastic conviction
of the original Church in Jerusalem that Jesus was
truly the glorified Christ, the Lord of all, the object
of worship, appointed to be the final judge of quick
and dead.

This passionate faith, which might have seemed
to be moving in the direction of the deification of
the man Jesus, was interpreted to the Church itself
by Saul of Tarsus the scourge of the Church who
was converted to become its glory in the light of
the title which In momentous utterances Jesus had
used to describe Himself the title of the Son of God.
Not the deification of a man, but the Incarnation of
the pre-existing Son, St. Paul declared to be the
interpretation of His person. And though no teacher
of the Church before St. Paul can be shown to have
given it expression, yet it appears that the whole

162

ST. PAUL'S FUNCTION 163

apostolic group and all the young churches welcomed
the interpretation as the truth, quite without con-
troversy. They must have felt that St. Paul was
only giving clear utterance to what the language
of Jesus implied about Himself, and what alone
could explain or justify the unreserved faith they
reposed in Him. The same doctrine of Christ's
person is expressed from a rather different point of
view by the Alexandrian author of the Epistle to
the Hebrews (cap. iii).

We saw that the Fourth Gospel gives this doctrine of
incarnation its fullest and most deliberate expression,
and makes the most decided claim to find in the
language of Jesus Himself its indisputable justifica-
tion ; and it was pointed out how strong the grounds
are for believing that the Fourth Gospel presents
us with a real historical tradition supplementary to
the earlier Gospels. Finally we examined the language
of the seer of the Apocalypse, and of James, and of
Jude, and of Peter, and, though they do not plainly
state any theory of Christ's person, we found it almost
impossible to believe that they could have been
satisfied with anything short of the Incarnation
doctrine, in view of the indications of their faith
which they give us.

There is, we saw, no rival adoptionist theory no
doctrine that is of a man adopted into the Godhead
(apotheosis) to be found in the New Testament,
whether previously to St. Paul's activity or after his
appearance on the scene. What had happened was
that the years immediately succeeding the death and
resurrection of Jesus saw the Church concentrated
upon the worship of the glorified Christ and Lord, and
treating Him as having " the values of God " for them,
without apparently finding it necessary to form or
proclaim any theory of His person. When St. Paul
was given to the Church to do this service for them,
they appear to have accepted his interpretation

164 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

unanimously. It must have been already at work,
we feel, under the surface in the apostolic company,
though it does not find expression in the Acts.
Later, in Jewish Ebionism and in Paul of Samosata's
Adoptionism, we are given positive theories rivals
of the Incarnation doctrine as that Jesus was an
inspired man and no more, or a man assumed into
the Godhead on account of his excellence but these
were certainly deteriorations from the level of the
whole New Testament, even from the unformulated
belief of the first Jerusalem Church. Indeed it is
impossible to read the Epistle to the Hebrews with-
out feeling that the writer's mind is full of the fear
that any clinging to antiquated Jewish rites and
ceremonies, on the part of those who have once con-
fessed Jesus, will involve a lapse, not only morally
but intellectually, from their first faith. And this
is what actually occurred, if not to the group overseas
to whom the Epistle to the Hebrews was apparently
addressed, yet certainly in Palestine and nearer
home (cap. IT).

After this we devoted special attention to the
apocalyptic element in the New Testament the
expectation of the future coming of the Christ in
glory and endeavoured to see it in its relation to
the whole Messianic idea ; and we saw that there are
no adequate grounds for the often repeated asser-
tion that Jesus Himself entertained the delusion of
the immediate coming of the end of the world (cap. v).

We shall have to pursue the course of the faith
to its formulation in the creeds of the Church and
the decisions of the Councils. But we had better
pause here. The theologians of the later Church
are unanimous in declaring that they were not
originating anything, but defending and defining the
faith of the New Testament the faith of the apostles.
This, no doubt, may be disputed and must be ex-
amined. But I think we shall find that they were

RIVAL THEORIES 165

justified in their contention in the sense that where
we pass off the ground of the New Testament we
leave behind us, already accomplished, the funda-
mentally creative work in Christian theology.

But, whether this be wholly true or no, there is
at any rate enough truth in it to justify us in pausing
at this point to ask whether the doctrine of the
incarnation of the Son of God, as we find it in St.
Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews and St. John,
is really the only legitimate way of thinking of and
accounting for the historical person Jesus of
Nazareth.

At the beginning of our inquiry 1 1 described certain
rival interpretations of His person which at present
are largely in occupation of the intellectual field,
and which are associated especially with the names
of Harnack, Schweitzer, and Bousset. It is common
to the maintainers of all these rival interpretations
that they approach the Gospels with what I think
we must call a dogmatic prejudice. On general philo-
sophical and historical grounds they peremptorily
refuse to admit the credibility of miracles, so far as
these go beyond healings of the sick effected by
suggestion, and apparently quite as peremptorily they
refuse to entertain, as even an hypothesis to be
fairly considered, the traditional conception of Jesus
as the incarnation of a divine person. At all costs
the Christ of history must for them be found non-
miraculous and (however much inspired by the
Spirit of God) purely a human person.

I have laboured (in the volume preceding this)
to convince my readers that these presuppositions are
unwarranted that we can approach the Gospels
open-minded. I also insisted that any treatment of

1 Sec above, pp. 35 ff.
12

166 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

the Gospels which refuses the strictly miraculous
is forced to eliminate so much out of the foundation
documents as to discredit them deeply as historical
records. The narrative has to be rewritten from the
point of view of each new critic, accentuating this
and leaving out that, as his particular judgment
dictates. The proof that this is so lies in the extra-
ordinary differences between the various critical re-
constructions of the historical Jesus, notably between
the three to which I specially called attention. My
answer, therefore, to those " critical " estimates I
have attempted to give in this way I have urged
the high claim of our foundation Gospel documents
and the Acts of the Apostles to take rank as credible
history. I have begged my readers to approach
the study of these documents with an open mind.
Taking them, not as exempt from error, but as good
history, and seeking to give an impartial attention
to all the elements of the narrative, I have sought
;to trace the growth of the belief in Christ's person
'as it is represented in these narratives and as it
reaches its coherent expression in the Epistles. The
picture of the development of a belief which such
impartial study discloses is to my mind very con-
vincing. The facts as they are recorded account for
the developing belief, and the belief interprets the
facts. It alone can interpret the facts as a whole.
In proof of this I must go back to Harnack and
Schweitzer.

Harnack admirably describes the ethical teaching
of Christ, but there are three elements in our funda-
mental records which he perforce refuses to admit
as historical, not on critical but on a priori grounds :
the claim of a divine Sonship which, as it stands
(both in St. Mark and Q), Harnack admits to be
superhuman ; the tremendous apocalyptic claim,
which he minimizes towards vanishing-point ; and
the miracles, especially the real Resurrection. That is

HARNACK'S ESTIMATE 167

to say that out of four elements in our foundation
Gospels, which are all equally and obtrusively present,
Harnack chooses one and fashions his picture out
of it alone, with the result that the Jesus of history,
as he represents Him, seems altogether inadequate to
account for the results which have flowed forth from
Him. Jesus, the ethical and spiritual prophet, was
a fact of history, but it appears that there was much
there besides.

I would advise anyone to read Harnack's account
of the faith in Jesus of the apostolic band imme-
diately after His death x and, without stopping to
criticize it in detail, ask himself whether it does not
require the actual fact of the Resurrection, and what
followed, to account for it. The picture in the
Gospels and Acts is lifelike and unmistakable. A
hesitating, vacillating company who deserted their
Master in the hour of His seeming failure and death
are, after a brief interval, transformed into a radiant,
confident band who can face the world with un-
flinching courage. The change is accounted for by
certain facts the fact of the Resurrection, made
evident by the repeated appearances of the risen
Lord, and His ascension to the right hand of God
and His mission of the Spirit. Harnack himself
dates St. Paul's conversion, herein differing from
most authorities, as early as a year after our Lord's
death. He does not question that the record which
St. Paul gives us of His resurrection on the third
day and His subsequent appearances 2 was what he
received from " the primitive community." It was
a record of a succession of solid and distinct events.
But in Harnack's estimate these supposed events
were the projection upon the outward world of their
own vivid imagination. Their state of mind pro-
duced the supposed events, not real events their state
of mind. They felt that Jesus had really, as He said,
1 Lecture IX of What is Christianity ? 1 Cor. xv.

168 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

died for them. They felt that He must have sur-
vived death, and that God must vindicate Him.
Their Messianic beliefs invested Him with supreme
Lordship. And all this, though in reality their faith
had failed them under the scandal of the Cross, and
God had not vindicated Jesus by any outward event,
and He did not come in glory as they expected.
Granted the primitive faith, solidly grounded on
the experiences reqorded in the last chapters of the
Gospels and the opening chapters of the Acts, the
Church can start on its course, as we see it, in the
enthusiasm of conviction. But it was the facts
which created the conviction. And apart from the
impact of indisputable facts, the moral transformation
of the apostles and the triumphant certitude of the
Acts are quite unaccountable. Also, I cannot believe
that St. Paul's doctrine of the divine Son incarnate
would ever have received the unquestioned accept-
ance which the evidence shows it received, if it had
not been grounded beyond question on the Lord's
own witness to Himself.

It is almost comic to pass from Harnack to
Schweitzer, for what is all in all to the one is nothing
to the other. For Schweitzer Jesus is hardly an
ethical teacher at all. He is an apocalyptic seer
of what we cannot but call a fanatical type. He is
that and almost nothing else. He created a flaming
expectation in the first Jerusalem Church of His
speedy earning in the clouds of heaven. Again we
note, as with Harnack, that there is nothing admitted
to have occurred which accounts for the trans-
formation of the character of the Twelve from
utter despondency to confident enthusiasm. But in
Harnack's account the first Christians have at least
a task before them. There is an ethical gospel
a gospel of divine Fatherhood and human brother-
hood to be preached, and a life to be realized on
earth by the community of believers. Christianity

OTHER ESTIMATES 169

is "the Way." But according to Schweitzer they
appear to have nothing to do no divine legacy left
them, except the expectation of the Christ coming
in the clouds to judge the world, which was not
realized. The Christ who has been so potent a
factor in human history, who has given to men so
new a sense of the worth, here and now, of human per-
sonality and human life, has, according to Schweitzer,
hardly anything to do with Jesus as in fact He was.
He again, like Harnack, only more one-sidedly, has
fastened upon one element in the record the apoca-
lyptic and has sought to fashion out of it the
complete picture, again with the result that the
supposed Jesus cannot supply any intelligible ex-
planation of the Church which was called by His
name.

In Bousset's and Kirsopp Lake's estimate of
history there is even less in the historical Jesus than
Harnack or Schweitzer finds there. There is even
less any adequate historical cause of the great effect.
On the showing of these very radical critics the
Catholic Church owes comparatively little to Him
except His prophetic teaching about God and the
example of His noble life and self-sacrificing death.

Now, is it not the most effective argument against
all these three schools of interpreters to show that
there is a picture of Jesus of Nazareth, which is
formed by taking our records seriously as historical
documents, which takes in what each of these groups
of interpreters wishes to emphasize, but by taking
in also what they severally or all together repudiate
(though without any critical ground for their re-
pudiation) can combine all the elements in one
strangely compelling and convincing whole, which
moreover is obviously adequate as no one of these
partial or one-sided estimates of the " Jesus of
History " is- to explain the effects which are summed
up in the religion of the New Testament ?

170 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

II

Certainly it is easier to examine the views of the
critics whom we have been considering than those
of our English Modernists. The German and
French scholars at any rate express their views as
lucidly as possible^ and show us quite clearly what
they mean and whither they are moving. But
the greater number of our English Modernists do
not give us this intellectual satisfaction.

The Report of their Conference at Cambridge in
the summer of 1921, on Christ and the Creeds, 1
seemed to me to be more markedly characterized
by strong statements of what the speakers do not
believe than by clear exposition of what they do.
It was unfortunate also that the question, what is the
best intellectual expression which we can find for
the truth about Christ, was crossed and confused
by a quite different issue what is the intellectual
obligation involved in the honest recitation of the
Creeds. These two issues had better be kept quite
distinct, and with the latter we are not concerned
in this book. It was also apparent that the speakers
at the conference were men holding very different
views. Nevertheless the Report made certain things
evident.

(1) The Modernist movement as a whole is not,
as Dr. Sanday used to try to persuade us to believe,
a movement which would be satisfied with eliminating
from the Christian creed the affirmation of certain
miracles, leaving the ideas about God and the
Incarnation untouched. It is a movement which
as a whole demands a trenchant rehandling of our
doctrine of God and of the person of Christ. It is
a clear gain to recognize this. The really root
^Report in Modern Churchman, Sept. 1921.

THE ENGLISH MODERNISTS 171

question is the question of what sort is the God in
whom we believe. 1

(2) Some of those who took part in the conference
" differ " (as one of them says) " from the Chalce-
donian Fathers by holding that the substances of
deity and humanity are not two but one. Perfect
humanity is deity under human conditions." 2 I
have already sought to make it evident that such an
idea as this was familiar enough in the Greek world,
but is quite contrary to the fundamental Hebrew
doctrine of God the Creator, always essentially and
fundamentally distinct from all His creatures, which
our Lord and His apostles take for granted. 3 That
men are portions of God in respect of their reason
or spirit that God would not be complete without
man that a man by becoming good and realizing
himself as a rational being would become God or
a god are familiar propositions in certain types of
Hellenism and (except the last) in certain types of
modern philosophy. But they are flatly contrary to
the root conceptions on which our religion was based.
The first matter (intellectually speaking) on which we
have to make up our minds is whether the Hebrew
conception of God, which is the foundation of the
Christian religion, is valid i.e. due to a real self-
disclosure of God through the Hebrew prophets and
Jesus Christ. We only lose time by trying to evade
this question. In the volume which preceded this
I have sought carefully to examine it, and to give the
reasons which seem to me to justify the belief in a
positive self-disclosure of God on which the Christian
Gospel is based.

1 This is admirably emphasized in an article by the Rev. Richard
Hanson, " Anglicanism and Modern Problems," Church Quarterly,
April 1922.

2 Report, pp. 196-8. Again, p. 293. The idea thus expressed,
" They treat God and man as two distinct, real existences (sub-
stances) each with its own special characteristics," is repudiated as
unsatisfactory.

8 See above, p. 5 ; and Belief in God, chaps, v and vi.

172 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

(3) Others in the Conference repudiated very
emphatically the conception which we find so
decidedly expressed in St. Paul and St. John of a
divine person, pre-existing, who in the fulness of
time became man for our salvation. 1 Language is
used which suggests the ancient idea of Adoptionism
the idea of a perfectly good man and singularly
inspired prophet raised to divine honours and
identified with God. Now I associate myself wholly
with a remark made by Dr. Kirsopp Lake 2 :
" Adoptionism seems to me to have no part or lot
in any intelligent modern theology, though it is
unfortunately often promulgated, especially in pulpits
which are regarded as liberal. We cannot believe
that at any time a human being, in consequence
of his virtue, became God, which he was not before,
or that any human being will ever do so. No doctrine
of Christology, and no doctrine of salvation, which
is Adoptionist in essence, can ever come to terms
with modern thought." I do not think there is
any doubt that we have in our day to choose ulti-
mately between the incarnation doctrine of St.
Paul and St. John and the Creeds and, on the other
hand, the conception of Christ as the best, or one
of the best, and most inspired of men, who left to
men the heritage of the grandest teaching about
the fatherhood of God, and the possibilities of
humanity, and the purest example of love and
sacrifice, and who, after His death, was deified only
in the imagination of His disciples. But I cannot
square the record of Jesus, as it stands, with such
incontestable evidence of reality, in the Gospels, or
the record of the impression which He made on His
disciples, with any merely humanitarian estimate
of Him. The bedrock of the Catholic conviction
about Jesus is in these earliest records. But on this

1 Report, pp. 287, 288, 276 f.

8 Landmarlis in Early Christianity, pp. 131-2.

THE FUNDAMENTAL ISSUE 173

I have already said what seems to me the certain
truth 1 ; and I can only ask my readers to concentrate
on this point all their powers of spiritual appre-
hension, with the sincere desire to reach a decision.
Before I take leave of them, I shall ask them to
estimate the importance for human life which is
involved in that decision. 2 But all that I ask for
now is a frank and conscientious exercise of the
responsibility of judgment on the facts of the case.
Dr. Bethune Baker at the Cambridge Conference
spoke of men being " hypnotized by orthodox pre-
suppositions." I seem to see more intelligent people
to-day who are hypnotized by unorthodox pre-
suppositions. However, there is no question at
present of orthodoxy or unorthodoxy. These words
imply an ecclesiastical authority, and no question
of ecclesiastical authority has been raised at all.
I have been trying to proceed simply as an individual
doing his best to form a true judgment in view of
all the facts. That seems to be for many minds
to-day the first necessity. And I ask for a like
frankness on the part of my readers.

Ill

But there is no doubt that the New Testament
doctrine of the person of Christ, while it has inspired
and still inspires the faith of millions, also rouses
a sense of antagonism in a great many minds an
antagonism of a kind which is peculiar to our time.
They feel what can perhaps best be expressed by
saying that the doctrine in effect dehumanizes
Christ, even if in theory and formally it safeguards
His manhood. This Christ, they say, whom you
describe as sinless, and who certainly, if the pages

1 See above, p. 46 ff.
8 See below, pp. 314 ff.

174 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

of the Gospels can be taken to give an undistorted
picture of Him, appears as never betraying any
sense of error, moral weakness, or insufficiency- this
Christ moreover whom you describe as personally
the eternal Son of God manifested in human flesh,
and at no moment therefore merely man makes
no appeal to us. His example is of no use to us.
What we need for our help and encouragement is a
man who is only a man and has no resources but
such as are common to men, and no exemptions from
human frailties. Only such a Christ could encourage
us to believe that we can become as he was.

Words like these are often used with deep sincerity
and real passion. When like words were used to
Augustine many centuries ago, he pressed his Pelagian
antagonist with the inquiry whether he meant that
he wanted a Christ who starts precisely from the
common human level of sinfulness ; and whether,
therefore, he would not, if he were logical, find the
most encouraging Christ to be one who had to start
with the most evilly disposed nature to tame, and
the most unruly lusts and passions to subdue. 1
This is a very shrewd question which the objector
would not have found it easy to answer. In fact,
if it is merely a question of an encouraging example,
the most valuable example for each of us would appear
to be the person who starts most completely on
his own level. But it is impossible to read the
Gospels and not feel that Jesus Christ did not appeal
to men primarily or chiefly as an example they

1 Augustine, c. Julian, op. imperfect, iv. cc. 48-57. These are very
interesting chapters. See c. 49 : " Christue . . . eicut in virtu te
omnium hominum maximus, ita ease in came libidinosissimus
debuit " ; and c. 62 : "Sic ee amator egregius castitatis ut
tibi castior videatur qui concubitus illicitos cupit, Bed ut non
perpretret, suae cupiditati resistit." Again Christ, according to
Julian, should be represented as saying, "Estote ergo casti, quia,
ut vobis ad me imitandum obstacula excusationis auferrem,
libininoaior vobis nasci volui, et tamen maximam libidinem meam
concessos fines nunquam transire permisi."

CHRIST OUR EXAMPLE 175

could follow. They felt Him to be in some for-
midable sense above them teaching and working
with a quite extraordinary authority drawing them
with a tremendous claim as from above claiming,
controlling, saving, judging. About this there can
be no question, if the Gospels are in any sense
historical. And it is no use fashioning a Christ
of our own fancy.

We must not, of course, minimize the reality and
value of His human example. Certainly, as St.
Peter says, He left us an example that we should
follow in His steps. This cannot be too strongly
or constantly insisted upon, and we will come back
to it. But first of all let us think out the meaning
of this plea for an example on our own level. Let
us realize the limitations of mere example. The
mere example of one individual man upon his fellows
tells most when men are living close together under
similar conditions as amongst the crew of a ship,
or the soldiers of a regiment, or the boys of a school,
or the members of a profession. Anything which
suggests difference of conditions weakens the force
of mere example and speedily annihilates it. The
example of a respectable clergyman's temperance
has no effect upon a man living in an uncomfort-
able cottage with no refuge but the public-house.
Difference of race, again, or remoteness of time,
almost at once destroys the force of example. An
Englishman is not commonly much impressed by
the hardness of ancient Spartans or the asceticism
of Indian fakirs. Once again the strong sense of
what we call genius in another, in proportion to the
feeling of uniqueness which it arouses in us, destroys
the appeal of his example. In all these ways, it must
be acknowledged, the mere example of a Christ who
lived nearly two thousand years ago in remote
Syria, under conditions utterly unlike ours one,
moreover, who was on all showing a supreme moral

176 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

genius would have little effect on us to-day, and
indeed would hardly have survived in the memory
of men but as a remote legend.

In fact, if you look to the men of supreme moral
and religious influence in our race, you find that
this influence has depended upon their power of
perpetuating themselves in some sort of institution
or system of teaching and discipline. The Buddha
perpetuated himself in " the way " which he taught
the way of escape into the ultimate Nirvana out
of the endless and weary succession of existences ;
and the success of his method for those who accept
his premiss that life is an evil to be escaped from
has been made evident down the generations in
constant examples. What we have to take note of
in the case of our Lord is the actual manner in which
his example and teaching were in fact perpetuated,
and we shall be astonished, and perhaps at first
irritated, to find how in fact it was the belief in Him
as a person essentially superhuman and divine which
alone enabled His influence to become permanently
powerful.

As a teacher, living as man among men, it ap-
peared that neither His teaching nor His example
was effective with His first disciples. He was alto-
gether too high for them too unworldly. They
failed under the strain He laid upon them and de-
serted Him. What recovered them was their hardly
won faith in His resurrection, which convinced them
of His supernatural Sonship, and their consciousness
of the divine Spirit His Father's Spirit and His
own received as a distinctive gift at a memorable
moment. Thereby they realized Christ as their
living Lord who from heaven was inspiring, guiding,
governing and enriching them with an inward life ; in
virtue of which His outward example, their memory
of which is recorded in the Gospels, became some-
thing quite different from the mere example of a

CHRIST IN US 177

departed hero. The example living in their memory
was the pattern of humanity, or " the way," in
accordance with which He was moulding them from
heaven by His Spirit. It was only " in Christ " that
they could follow Christ. But it was only because
He was something more than man something in
respect of which they would have felt it madness to
equal themselves with Him that He could be living
in them and they in Him that He could thus have
access to their inmost souls, and remake them, and
" dwell in their hearts by faith."

And this has been true for all successive generations
of Christians. The example of Christ has been of
supreme importance. He called Himself the Son of
Man, or the Man. That pattern of glorious man-
hood glorious in all its relations, Godward and man-
ward, and not least in its matchless self-control-
has appealed to men in each successive generation
as presenting an ideal before which all cynicism is
put to flight. Here is the man whose life is alto-
gether worthy of fullest admiration. If He is the
real man, there remains no manner of doubt in our
hearts that the life of a man, even under extremest
conditions of failure and suffering, is altogether worth
liring. But in its supreme perfection it would seem
to us, as it seemed to the first disciples, an example
of despair. It postulates for life forces and powers
which we seem to lack. And, in fact, He appears
in the Gospels as claiming a mastery over other
men's lives which it is not for a mere man to claim.
But He did not end by setting an example. He
died, but He is still alive. That is the point of
the Christian belief. It concerns " one Jesus who
was dead, whom Paul," and all Christians since, have
" affirmed to be alive." Yes, alive in the heavens
the same Son of God who came down from heaven
to redeem our nature from within by Himself taking
it, and exalting it into the glory of God ; and who

178 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

thus alive in the heavens is alive in us also by His
Spirit, moulding us inwardly into the pattern of the
life He showed us outwardly in word and work.
There is no possibility of question that this is the
way in which Christ's example has in fact appealed
to men in the succession of generations. They have
studied " the life," " the way," in the pages of the
Gospel, as described in His words and as lived in
His conduct, and also as reflected in countless saints
who were His true disciples ; and however low the
level at which they may have started to become His
disciples and to imitate Him, however degraded and
polluted they have felt their manhood to be, they
have not despaired because they believed in Him,
not only as their pattern of manhood, but as their
Redeemer, in whose name they were set free from all
the guilt of the past and were granted that incom-
parable blessing, the forgiveness of their sins that
is, the opportunity constantly renewed of a fresh
start free from all the guilt and burden of the past
and also that without which example and absolution
would have been alike useless the gift of the Spirit,
the Spirit of His Father and His own Spirit, poured
into them out of His heavenly manhood to purge them
and strengthen them and renew them inwardly after
the pattern which in His human life He had shown
them outwardly. No one can doubt that that has
been the way in which Christ has exerted His in-
fluence and made His example effective down the
centuries like the example of no other man. This
sort of influence has a sort of analogy in the influence
of other men over their fellows. But in His case
there has been an " influence " or " inflowing " of
Him into all those who have accepted Him as their
Master which has been quite distinctive. Of no mere
man could it be said that he could thus gain effective
entry into the very centre of the personalities of all
other men, so as to renew them from the roots of

THE GIFT OF THE SPIRIT 179

their being by his spirit, and make them " in
him" new men. That is a recreative act which,
in the full sense in which it has been experienced
from the first, can be assigned to none other than
Him " in whom we live and move and are."

Unless I am very much mistaken, there is singu-
larly prevalent to-day, especially in the English-
speaking world, what is, I am persuaded, at the
bottom an irrational pride the sort of pride which
is rooted in a wholly false view of human independ-
ence which is only willing to accept a doctrine of
incarnation if it be understood as the incarnation of
God in humanity at large, of which the incarnation
in Christ is only what I may call the foremost speci-
men. According to this presentation, I am to see in
Christ what I have it in me to become. He demon-
strates the power of the divine Spirit in humanity
in a sense which, without Him, I should never per-
haps have suspected, but which, once instructed by
Him, I can realize in myself without needing from
Him anything but the light of His example. He
says to us, in effect, " You can all be Christ s like
me, if you will." But this is the most astonishingly
unhistorical representation. I do not mean merely
that the matter is not so represented in the New
Testament, but that it has not so been realized in
Christian experience.

However, the highest type of Christian experience
may be found in the New Testament. And what
we find there does, to a degree which startles us,
negate the manner of thinking and speaking which
I have just tried to describe.

In the New Testament there is scarcely a hint to
be found of a universal gift of the Spirit of God to
men because they are men. 1 There is suggested a

1 James iv 5 is, of course, very difficult. If it means " He [God]
jealously longs for the spirit which He [at our original creation,
when He breathed into our nostrils the breath of life] caused to

180 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

universal presence to all men of the divine Light
which is the Word of God, 1 but the Spirit, who makes
the light effectual, is, as a matter of fact, represented
as given only through the Risen Christ to those who
believe in Him, and as a gift communicated at a
definable moment. Let us confine ourselves to the
historical or literary facts for the present. I am
not saying that the New Testament excludes the
idea that the Holy Spirit is in such sense " the
giver of life," as that wherever life is, and especially
wherever rational and moral life is, He Himself must
be. This is indeed suggested in the Old Testament.
There God's spirit or breath is in all things and
inspires the natural gifts of all men, as well as the
special endowments of the prophets. As the Book
of Wisdom says, " the spirit of the Lord filleth the
world." And I think the orthodox Christian theology
of the Holy Trinity makes such an assumption in-
evitable. Thus we are not to agree with Origen,
who would seemingly have actually limited the
activity of the Holy spirit within the circle of " the
saints," or the believing Church. It is not for us
so to limit God's activity. The Spirit, like the wind
which represents Him, " bloweth where it listeth."
Nevertheless, from end to end of the New Testament
the gift of the Spirit is only contemplated first as
given to John the Baptist, the prophet who is to
prepare for Christ, 2 then as especially the agent
in the conception of Christ, 8 then as imparted to
Christ for the fulfilment of His mission, 4 and, finally,
as to be expected from Him and as actually poured
out by Him upon those who believe in Him. Thus
in the Gospels men are expected to see in Christ the
action of the Holy Spirit, and it is blasphemy against

dwell in us," as Dr. Hort interprets, then there is no reference here
to anything but the spirit of man, which is distinct from the Spirit
of God.

1 John i 9. * Luke i 15, also ii 26 ff. to Simeon.

3 Luke i 35. Mark i 10.

THE SPIRIT MEDIATED BY CHRIST 181

the Spirit to attribute His works to the evil one.
And the disciples are to expect the Spirit as a future
endowment which they have not yet received. This,
of course, is in a very marked way the teaching
of the Fourth Gospel : " The Spirit was not yet
(given), because Jesus was not yet glorified." l " My
Father will give you another helper in my name," or
" I will send him unto you." 2 But it is equally the
teaching of St. Luke at the beginning of the Acts.
There the disciples are anxiously to await a gift
which they have not yet received, arid the gift is
represented as communicated in an objective form
under memorable conditions on the day of Pentecost.
Afterwards, also, the gift appears as given in an
objective manner in baptism and the laying on
of hands. 3 The disciples of John the Baptist
at Ephesus need to be instructed about the gift
of the Holy Ghost and to receive Him in due
manner. 4

Even the saintly Roman soldier Cornelius, with the
pious group around him, though his prayers and alms
have already gained him acceptance with God, and
though God makes evident by a visible manifestation
that He has given him His Spirit, must receive at
least the outward form of baptism. 5 So important *
it is to make it evident that the New Israel only,
the Church of Jesus Christ, is the home or sphere
of the Spirit. I suppose that if you had asked a
New Testament disciple what it is to be a Christian,
he would have given one of two replies either that
a Christian is one who believes that Jesus is Lord
or that he is one who has " received the Spirit "
of God. St. Paul uses the phrase as equivalent to
being a Christian. "Received ye the Spirit," he
asks, " by the works of the law or by the hearing
of faith ? ' : It is not possible to state too strongly

1 John vii 39. John xiv 16, xv 26.

3 Acts viii 17-18. xix 1-6. 5 Acts x 24-47.

13

182 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

that the Spirit is, in the New Testament, regarded
as possessing the Church, and as not to be expected
or looked for except as received from Christ and
within the membership of His society.

Let us then sum the matter up. Thank God the
New Testament sets no limit to the activity of the
divine Spirit. Nay, it may truly be said that it is
blasphemy against the Spirit to deny His activity
wherever we see active goodness among men. But it
is true that the New Testament deliberately concen-
trates our attention upon the new gift of the Spirit
as given in Christ and through Christ. It tells us
that all that we see in the man Christ is to be made
common to all men of good will but it adds " in
Christ " and " through Christ." It addresses man-
kind as needing to be redeemed, and the effective
evidence of such redemption is found in the gift
of the Spirit communicated to them as a newly-
given gift from Christ. We are all to be anointed by
the same Spirit which possessed Him we are all
(if you will) to be Christs but it is not as individuals
in our own right. That right we are left to suppose
we have lost and can only recover in Christ. 1 It is
idle to dispute that this is the message of the Bible.
Thus there is truly to be an incarnation of God in
humanity, but it is in the New Humanity, through
Christ, by deliberate faith and conscious incorpora-
tion into His society. That is the message declared
and covenanted and open. What lies in the secret
counsels of God for humanity beyond the area of
this message, or where the message has been mis-
understood because misdelivered, is not part of the
message, though it may be part of the hope of the
human heart which has been taught in Christ that
God is justice and love, and that there is no limit to
His love.

1 John i 12, " As many as received him, to them gave he the
right to become children of God."

SUPPOSED FAULTS IN CHRIST 183

Then to wind all this up. I think no one who
considers how the Catholic Church has blurred the
full message of Christ's humanity and His human
example of which we shall have sad occasion to
speak can be anyway surprised if such unfaithful-
ness has led to violent reactions of feeling against
the Church and the message of the Church. But
after all, what we want to know is the truth about
the Christian message : and also we make an eager
appeal to the specifically Christian experience. Of
the Christian message then as the New Testament
expounds it and as Christian experience over the
centuries has on the whole confirmed it, I say this
without hesitation : that it does not proclaim a
Christ whose human example would have sufficed
for us : or a Christ who is only a specimen of the
forces of manhood which we all already carry within
ourselves. It proclaims Christ the Man indeed,
but the man whom we need as our saviour as well as
our example whom we need to make us new men,
through faith in Him and by the receiving of His
Spirit, in such a way as is inconceivable unless He
is all along something much more than man. So
that the very features of the Person which seem
to remove His example furthest from us appear at
the last as the very conditions of its being brought
close to us in permanently effective power.

IV

There is another kind of objection to the idea or
doctrine of Christ as really the manifestation of God
in manhood, on the ground of doubts about His
moral perfection. I am sure, for instance, that there
are a good many honest people who feel that our
Lord's tremendous denunciations of the scribes and
Pharisees l are indiscriminating and violent that
1 Matt, xxii, Mark xii 38-40, Luke XK 45-7.

184 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

they would indeed be in the spirit of the Old Testa-
ment, but that, if Christ really uttered them, they
were not worthy of Him.

Again, the " cursing of the barren fig-tree," taken
as it stands in Mark, is described as expressing a
spirit of sudden anger, unreasoning and revengeful ;
so that the critics, who are very skilful in getting
rid of what they do not like, very commonly seek to
exclude it as a historical incident from the narrative,
and represent it as a parable misunderstood. I do
not think they are successful. For it stands a very
vividly described incident in St. Mark's narrative,
with details which seem singularly precise and con-
vincing. 1 It is true that St. Mark's explanatory
phrase, " for the time of figs was not yet," appears
to be misleading. What our Lord was apparently
expecting to feed upon was the green knops (the
" green figs " of Cant, ii 13) which appear on the
fig-tree before the leaves, and without which any
leafy fig-tree will, of course, be barren for the year.
These green knops are, we are informed, still
commonly eaten in Palestine. Not finding any,
our Lord discerned in the fig-tree the type of an
outward show of life (the leaves) which is in fact
unfruitful, and He pronounced a solemn doom on
this deceitful show. It seems to me a miracle of
judgment very penetrating in its significance. I do
not feel the least inclined either to doubt the fact
or to apologize for it.

As to the denunciations of the scribes and Pharisees,
they may perhaps have been directed, not against
all the scribes and Pharisees, but against a certain
class or section of them. But if the Gospels and
St. Paul represent the historical situation with any
fidelity, these rigid maintainers of Jewish orthodoxy
and tradition were as a class deeply corrupted by
formalism, self-righteousness, hypocrisy and self-

Markxi 12 ff. t 20 ff.

CHRIST'S SEVERE JUDGMENTS 185

seeking. 1 Our Lord does not appear anywhere to
have denounced the principle of ecclesiastical
authority or ceremonial observance- to this question
we will come back in the next volume but, if we
consider what the characteristic vices of ecclesiastical
authority have been in many ages when the Church
was seemingly powerful, and the awful hindrance
to the spiritual influence of Christ's religion which
these characteristic vices of ecclesiastics have proved
themselves to be, we shall surely feel that the Master
of human life, who discerned so deeply its tendencies
and dangers, had good cause to utter even the
tremendous denunciations which are ascribed to
Him of pride and selfishness parading itself in the
guise of religion. Again I cannot apologize or
explain away. I know indeed that there is a spirit
m our age which would like to eliminate out of its
conception of God the whole element of fiery indig-
nation, whether against false religion or any other
kind of sin. " I believe," writes one of our
modernists, " that we shall come to see that it is
precisely those contemporary ideas of the wrath of
God and His ultimate avenging activity as destroy-
ing Judge, which are the unauthentic elements in
the teaching ascribed to Jesus." 2 Language like
this, I confess, makes me shiver. I feel sure in my
conscience that if God is really as the prophets
disclose Him, and sin is essentially what the Bible
represents it as being and the deepest spiritual
experience of Christendom has given its assent to
the representation the wrath of God against sin
and the awfulness of final judgment remain a quite
essential and permanent element of " the truth as
it is in Jesus." Thus I read our Lord's tremendous
" dooms " with awe and terror indeed, but not

1 See Rom. ii 17-23, and, besides the passages in the note on
p. 183, Luke xvi 14.

1 Dr. Emmet in the Modem Churchman, p. 221.

186 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

with any expectation that the enlightened con-
science of men will ever have cause to wish them
away. Without them the picture of Jesus would
fail altogether to represent the whole truth about
God.

It is, of course, sometimes pleaded that we have
no right to claim for our Lord moral perfection in
the fullest sense that in fact He disclaimed such
goodness when He said to the young man " Why
callest thou me good ? None is good save one,
even God." l But it is, I think, certainly a mistake
so to interpret His words. In the Gospels generally
our Lord seems to present Himself to His disciples
as an infallible guide and teacher and pattern.
There is not in all our Lord's words (other than the
words in question) the slightest sign of the conscious-
ness of sin or of the fear of going wrong. Certainly
He cannot have disclaimed goodness, even in the
highest sense, with any kind of consistency. And
the saying in question admits of a very natural and
suggestive interpretation. This young man came in
a spirit that was both self-complacent and flatter-
ing. Doubtless he both wanted to make himself
agreeable and to receive commendation. It was a
cheap thing to say " Good Master," and our Lord
pulls him up. 4 Young man, think what goodness
means when you call me good." I do not think
our Lord either disclaims goodness, nor, on the other
hand, that He means, as some orthodox com-
mentators have suggested, that He is good because
He is God. I think He simply means that the
goodness the young man is in search of is to be
found in God only, and he is not to give flattering
titles to men.

There are at least three occasions where our
Lord appears in the Gospels as simply challenging

1 St. Mark x 18 and Luke xviii 18. St. Matthew seems to
tone the saying down (xix 17).

HE DOES NOT DISCLAIM GOODNESS 187

men to think before they speak not to make glib
statements, or use convenient arguments which
intellectual or moral consistency ought to make
them shrink from. Thus He confronts the glib
and constant statement of the scribes, that the
Christ was to be the son of David l with the language
of the psalm, held to be David's, where he appears
to address the future Christ as Lord, and He asks
how David could call His future son his "Lord."
I do not think it is at all necessary to suppose that
Christ was here making any pronouncement on the
authorship of the psalm. He was simply pressing
the scribes with the duty of thinking before they
spoke His meaning being that their account of
the Christ was inadequate in the light of their own
Scriptures. So in the same way we should interpret
the strange passage, referred to earlier, in St. John, 2
where our Lord, so contrary to His general teach-
ing in this Gospel which is quite unmistakable
appears to minimize the meaning of the title " Son
of God." He seems to have meant that, at least in
some sense, His opponents must recognize its legiti-
macy in the case of anyone who represents in any
way the authority of God. In all these cases
mistaken conclusions have been drawn from the
words of Jesus as that He did not claim goodness,
or that He disowned sonship to David, or that He
meant little by calling Himself Son of God. These
conclusions are shown to be mistaken by the general
sense of His teaching. What He was doing in these
cases was to insist on men's thinking before they
spoke thinking whether a convenient argument or
lightly uttered word was not really incompatible
with what intellectual consistency or moral serious-
ness would force them to acknowledge. And this
is surely a very important lesson.

But we return to our main thesis. It is indeed
1 Mark xii 35. a John x 36. See above, pp. 5-6.

188 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

the case that we could hardly believe the doctrine of
the Incarnation, if we saw evidence of hasty passion
and moral imperfection in Jesus, or if He appeared
to have confessed to being deficient in goodness.
But such evidences and confessions are not really
,to be found. The character of Jesus, as the Gospels
describe Him, remains in the moral region supreme
and perfect so impressive, I think, in its majesty,
that it hushes in our minds the first suggestions of
criticism.

Finally we have the suggestion to consider, that
Jesus showed Himself in certain respects unmistak-
ably deluded the victim of current errors. Without
asking what kind of belief concerning Jesus would
be compatible with the acceptance of such a sug-
gestion, let us first of all consider carefully and
frankly the facts of the case.

We are bound to recognize in Jesus a real limita-
tion of knowledge. He Himself in a saying which
cannot be supposed to have been invented for Him,
but which is assuredly authentic declared Himself
ignorant of the day and hour of the end of the world.
He had no map of the future spread before His eyes.
He, the Son of God at least in His mortal life
was limited in knowledge and knew His limitation.
Thus there is no sign whatever that He transcended
the knowledge of natural things common to His
Palestinian contemporaries. Also, there is no pre-
tension of knowledge on any such subject. There
is in His teaching none of the " science falsely so-
called," which abounds in the contemporary apoca-
lypses. He cannot be said to have given any teaching
at all on any subject except on the great spiritual
subjects. And on these He seems to speak with a
sense of full authority amounting to infallibility.

HIS SUPPOSED DELUSIONS 189

I cannot resist that impression. " Verily, I say
unto you." That is enough. 1

But there are certain points on which our Lord
is commonly supposed to have given positive teaching
which was in fact erroneous.

1. He is supposed to have proclaimed His own
immediate coming in glory and the end of " this
world." I have dealt with this point at length. 2
The conclusion which the facts seem to me to warrant
is that our Lord expressly disclaimed knowledge of
the time and season of the end, and expressly warned
His disciples against supposing that God intended
such knowledge for them, though His disciples, or
some of them, misunderstood Him. There is no
real warrant for ascribing delusion to our Lord's
mind on the subject. Under this head no more
will be said here.

2. He is perceived to have shared the current
belief in devils and diabolic possession ; and this,
it is taken for granted, was no more than a super-
stition which we have outgrown.

Now I am not disposed to deny that in this matter
also there may have been occasional misunder-
standings on the part of His disciples. As I read
the account of the healing of the Gadarene, or
Gerasine, demoniac in St. Mark (Mark v 1-17), it
suggests itself somewhat readily that the supposed
permission given by Jesus for the entry of the
"' legion " of demons into the swine may have been
a misinterpretation on the part of the disciples.
And sometimes, when our Lord is speaking of evil
spirits, He undoubtedly uses metaphorical language. 8
But I think it is quite certain that He did believe
in evil and in good spirits, and in their activity
among men ; and not only did He believe this, but

1 On our Lord's use of " Amen," see Dalman, Words of Jesus,
pp. 226 ff.

Chap. V. 3 E.g. Luke xi 24-7.

190 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

He made it a quite distinct element in His teaching.
He would have His disciples look out upon the world
as a scene in which the conflict of good and evil
is not merely carried on among men. Behind the
activities of bad men He sees an awful invisible
agency organizing and maintaining a kingdom of
evil and enslaving the souls of men. " An enemy
hath done this " an evil will or army of wills, set
to thwart the good purpose of God. 1 And in various
widespread kinds of disease He recognized evil
spirits as possessing men and women, and constantly
dealt with them accordingly.

But have we the right to class all this as delusions
which we have outgrown ? Certainly, as to the
existence of spirits and their activity among men
there has been a very widespread assent given by
the conscience of men, and of men of the profoundest
spiritual insight. The testimony of such a man
as Frederick Denison Maurice is very impressive. 2
I do not think our knowledge authorizes any denial
of it. It seems to me that not only the personal
experience of individual souls but the spectacle of
the organization and continuity of evil influences in
the world, suggests the truth of the explanation
which our Lord certainly adopted as His own. And
as to the reality of diabolic possession, I have been
again and again deeply impressed by the testimony
of missionaries in non-Christian countries, that they
are not able to doubt it. * 4 It may or may not
exist in England," they say, " but it certainly
exists in India or China or Africa."

On the whole in view of the deep mystery of
evil in the world I fail to see what right men have
to treat the belief in evil spirits and their activity,

1 See Mark iii 22-30; Luke xi 17-26 (the obvious metaphors
do not conceal the also obvious intention of teaching truth) ; Matt,
xiii 28 ; Luke x 18, xiii 16, xxii 31, etc.

* See my St. John's Epistle*, pp. 145 ff.

HIS TEACHING ABOUT THE O. T. 191

or the belief in good spirits or angels, as error and
delusion, or as childish fancy which the mature
mind outgrows. But one point must be kept steadily
in view. The whole world in our Lord's time, and
Palestine not less than other districts, was weighed
down by the terror of evil spirits, just as a great
part of the world is to-day. Jesus no doubt affirmed
that they really existed and were the cause of
numberless moral and physical evils. But He would
not suffer men to remain in dread of them. His
whole teaching was of redemption. If men would
trust God, they could be free free from the fear
of evil spirits and from the fear of death. And He
was come to lead them to this liberty. As He is
recorded to have said to the Seventy : " I beheld
Satan fallen as lightning from heaven. Behold,
I have given you authority to tread upon serpents
and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy :
and nothing shall in any wise hurt you." 1 No
doubt it was this sense of victory over the powers
of evil among Christians which, as much as anything,
promoted the spread of the Church. The character-
istic of Christians should not be their belief in the
activity of evil spirits, but their belief that they
are impotent against the Redeemer of men.

3. There is lastly the assertion to be considered
that our Lord gave positive teaching about the Old
Testament which identifies Him with traditional
ideas about that literature which modern critical
science has shown to be untrue. I think this is an
exaggeration. On the whole our Lord's teaching
about the Old Testament is most remarkable for its
profound spiritual truth. No doubt, as He spoke
of the sun rising, so He spoke of the Books of
the Law as by Moses and the Psalter as by David,
and drew lessons from the narratives without any
question being raised of their historical character.
1 Luke x 18-19.

192 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

It would have been impossible to do otherwise, if
He was freely to use human language intelligible
to the people of Galilee or the Rabbis of Jerusalem.
I should suppose that He did not know what the
progress of critical science has made fairly evident
to us, but I should suppose also that there was in
His own consciousness a great distinction clearly
present between what He did know the spiritual
content of His message and all the popular assump-
tions of knowledge on matters which were not within
His scope. On matters not within the scope of His
mission, He appears as giving no positive teaching
at all.

The only occasion on which it seems to me that
it can be plausibly pleaded that He laid stress upon
a question of authorship or literary character in
books of the Bible was in His argument about Ps. ex.
On that occasion the verbal difference between the
narratives of the three Evangelists makes it evident
that we cannot rely on having the precise words of
Christ. On the other hand His purpose is quite
plain. It is not, as some moderns would have us
believe, to repudiate the Davidic descent of the
Christ, but to make it plain that the Scribes,
if they w r ere true to their accepted principles, would
not be able to speak as if the Christ was to be the
Son of David and nothing more. They must recog-
nize Him as David's Lord as well as David's Son.
I think it is quite enough for the fair interpretation
of the passage to represent our Lord as confronting
the Scribes with the requirements of their own lore,
without laying any stress on it Himself. I have
already pointed out that this sort of argumentum
ad hominem appears to have been characteristic of
our Lord. I should like to repeat that I believe
there must have been in His own consciousness
a vast region of common assumptions which He was
content to take for granted without confusing them

REPLIES TO OBJECTIONS 193

with the things which He knew. 1 Thus as concerns
the argument about Ps. ex, I do not think we are
compelled either to force men in the name of Jesus
to accept a theory of authorship which seems to us
very improbable, or to declare Christ mistaken.
It belonged to a region of knowledge in which He
knew that He had no commission, and in which
knowledge beyond that of His contemporaries
would, in fact, not have helped but hindered His
mission.

As to the bearing of our Lord's limited human
knowledge on the theory of the Incarnation, more
will be said in the next chapter. Here I want only
to draw a distinction, which I think the facts warrant,
between limitation of knowledge which must be
acknowledged in Him and anything which can be
called delusion or the teaching of error, of which I
cannot see the traces.

I know there are many good men who would say
that we can believe that our Lord was really the
victim of certain current delusions and taught in
accordance with these delusions, without affecting
our faith in the reality of the Incarnation as St. Paul
and St. John believed it. Here I admit I stumble.
But I need not pursue the question, because I dis-
pute the premiss. I see no positive delusion or error
in the teaching of Jesus. The truth of what He can
fairly be said to have taught seems to me to stand
secure, in spite of all the developments of science and
changes of human circumstance.

I have been seeking in this chapter only to show
what seems to me the essential weakness and one-
sidedness of each of the various humanitarian
estimates of Christ, and to obviate the objections
which are made against the doctrine of His person
as St. Paul and St. John present it to us. There is

1 On the limitations of our Lord's knowledge within the sphere
of His mortal life as man, see below, pp. 225 ff.

194 IS THE DOCTRINE TRUE

always, however, something unsatisfactory about the
result of saying no to a string of objections. Each
answer may seem in turn fairly satisfactory, but
there remains the sense that there is or may be
" something in them." And, in fact, on a subject
so great and mysterious as the person of Christ, it
is absurd to suppose that everything will be clear.
I have done my best with each of the objections in
turn, and I am not without hope that the answer
in each case will be felt to be stronger than the
objection. But it is quite certain that it is not
by any such negative process that any real con-
viction will be won. The real conviction must come
from the study of the positive picture in the Gospels.
It must be the gradually growing assurance that
this picture is not one which can be due to human
invention or imagination. It must overwhelm us
with the sense of its truth, and with the sense that
only the doctrine of the Incarnation can really
interpret it or account for it. And toward this
sort of conviction the removal of objections and the
consideration of particular literary problems only
make a very partial contribution. The conviction
itself must be of the sort suggested by Jesus Himself
when He said of Peter's first conviction of His
Messiahship : " Flesh and blood hath not revealed
it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven,"
and of the sort which St. Paul meant when he said,
" No man can say Jesm is Lord but in the Holy
Spirit."

Certainly it is not the case that our deepest and
most important convictions are those which involve
least difficulty, or those against which fewest ob-
jections can be plausibly urged. Certainly also, as
concerns the faith in Christ's person, the Evangelists
do not, on the whole, give us the impression that they
sought to remove difficulties for faith out of their
records. On the whole they give us the impression

THE GROUND OF CONVICTION 195

of candour and naivete in a high degree. It is not
pleaded therefore that there are no difficulties about
the traditional faith in Christ. What is pleaded is
that, if all the facts are frankly faced, the only con
ception which adequately account* for them is the
conception which the first Church was led to form
the conception of the incarnation of the Son of God
the doctrine of " the Word made flesh."

LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE

CHAPTER VII

THE DEFINITIONS OF THE COUNCILS CONCERNING
THE PERSON OF CHRIST

WE have been carefully reviewing the New Testa-
ment, and we have seen good reason for reaching
the conclusion that only the conception of Jesus
as the eternal Son of God incarnate is adequate to
account for the facts of the case that is especially
the spiritual authority claimed and exercised by
Him, which so plainly passes the limits of legitimate
human influence, and His own occasional utterances
about Himself; or, to view the matter from the
side of the disciples, the awestruck devotion passing
into worship which they experienced, and which
they expressed after the Resurrection by calling
their Master " the Lord " in a sense which certainly
involves divine sovereignty. And we noted how
carefully this conception of the Lord's person was
expressed by St. Paul and St. John and in the
Epistle to the Hebrews upon the background of,
and consistently with, the traditional monotheism
of the Jews, and how it was apparently accepted
throughout the apostolic churches without con-
troversy or demur how it is implied in the New
Testament writings where it is not explicit.

I

Merely considered as literary documents the
earliest which remain to us concerning the origin

196

THE N. T. IN THE CHURCH 197

of Christianity the books of the New Testament,
or almost all of them, stand by themselves in
importance. They alone represent the creative
period of the Christian Church, in the sense that
all the later literature represents an attitude of
conscious dependence upon a message already
delivered. Thus (1) we know practically nothing
about our Lord except what we find in the New
Testament. Among the few sayings ascribed to
Him which are preserved outside the New Testament
only one has any bearing upon the question of His
person that which occurs among His sayings in a
papyrus discovered not long ago on the site of
Oxyrhynchus in Egypt x : " Where one is alone,
so am I with him. Raise the stone and there you
will find me ; cleave the wood and there am I too."
This, if it were a genuine saying, would seem to
ascribe to our Lord Himself a declaration of His
universal presence in nature. But he would indeed
be bold who would assert its genuineness. As
Dr. Burkitt says, these brief sayings seem to repre-
sent an early Egyptian amalgamation of Hellenistic
and Christian ideas. And the apocryphal " Gospels "
which remain to us serve no purpose at all except to
show how poor a thing the early Christian imagina-
tion proved to be when it sought to invent further
accounts of our Lord's infancy or childhood, or of His
appearances after His resurrection. Again (2) there
is no other record of the first life of the Christian
Church except St. Luke's in the Acts. (3) As to the
Epistles, it would be impossible to make a brief
statement about the signs of their early diffusion
and influence which would be sufficiently accurate.
Certainly some of St. Paul's most characteristic
ideas as concerning justification by faith and the
relation of Grace to Law did not deeply influence
the early Church. Plainly they had not understood

1 See Grenfell and Hunt, Logia lesou (1897), p. 12.
14

198 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

him. But as far as the conception of Christ's person
is concerned, the doctrine of the incarnation of the
pre-existent divine Son in Jesus the Christ is the
accepted tradition behind the earliest sub-apostolic
writers Clement, Barnabas, Ignatius, Hermas and
the Apologists. 1 It holds the field before the Christian
Church had any New Testament.

This is what the ordinary Christian has not grasped.
The earliest Christian Church had a collection of
Holy Scriptures ; but it was simply the Old Testa-
ment canon. It is marvellous with what unanimity
the Gentiles, who very soon swallowed up the Jewish
element in the Church, accepted the Jewish founda-
tion and the Jewish Scriptures. It was long before
they collected their apostolic writings into a canon.
The history of this formation of a canon is obscure,
as very much is obscure in the earliest Christian
history. But by the middle of the second century
the four Gospels were practically canonized, and
doubtless from very early days the apostolic Epistles
were read in the churches to which they were addressed,
and began to pass from church to church. How-
ever, for the first hundred years of the Church's
existence it had no Bible no standard of reference
except the Old Testament and " the tradition "
that is, the teaching first given in each local church
by its apostolic founder, fortified by the constant
intercourse between the different churches. We
have already seen that the writers of the Epistles
can take for granted a certain " tradition " as known
to those they wrote to ; and from what they take
for granted we can more or less gather the content
ef the tradition in the different churches. 2

So equipped, then, the young churches started on
their career in a world singularly well adapted to

1 See appended note at the end of the chapter, p. 228, on Hermas,
the Didache, etc.

* See Belie/ in God, pp. 207 ff.

THE HELLENISTIC WORLD 199

puzzle and bewilder them. For the Hellenistic world
of the Roman Empire was in a state of intellectual
ferment. It was not a day of great philosophers,
but it was a day when intellectual interest was keen.
Men were widely seeking some doctrine of the
" whence " and the " whither " some doctrine of
how the world which seems so evil was made and is
governed and how the hapless soul of man is to
escape from the changes and chances of this mortal
life into some region of calm and security and
immortality. And the cities were full of teachers
and lecturers who had each of them a " gnosis,"
a " knowledge " or theory of his own, which was
either divulged to all who would come and listen,
or reserved as a secret for the initiates into this or
that " mystery-cult." Christianity spread rapidly
because of its moral attractiveness, and especially
probably because of its practical spirit of brother-
hood. And there were multitudes of " gnostics "
who were ready enough to adopt the Christian ideas
and sacred names, and adjust them to their cosmic
theories. So the Christian churches found them-
selves in a bewildering world of speculation and
of fusion between different systems and traditions,
and they were forced to clear up their ideas and to
know their own mind. Moreover, though Christianity
had qualities which made it popular, it had others
which rendered it profoundly unpopular. It was
suspected of being a secret society, disloyal to the
Emperor and the Empire. It was thus always
subject to persecution, because it was supposed to
encourage the dangerous elements in society. And
the darkest stories were told about its nocturnal
gatherings and secret orgies. So, not only was it
driven by its inner necessities to obtain a clear
account of its own doctrine, it was also driven to
explain itself to those outside, and to seek to remove
the suspicions of the authorities. This is the origin

200 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

of the " Apologies," and it is the apologists of the
second century who made the first attempt to present,
in terms acceptable and intelligible to the outside
world, an explanation of Christianity as a doctrine
and as a way of life.

Of these apologists let us take Justin Martyr as
an example. He had found his way to Christianity
through disappointment with the various philo-
sophies. But he retained his philosopher's dress,
and would still present the doctrine in which he had
found satisfaction so as to be intelligible and accept-
able in the world that he had left. He made great
play with the Logos-doctrine, that is the doctrine
of the divine reason and energy immanent in the
universe, which, as we have seen, was the popular
idea of the day, and one which Christianity could
use in its own sense. But he is not by any means
a sure-footed theologian, and he falls into modes
of expression which he had much better not have
used, and which the Church after him had to re-
pudiate as when he talked of the Word or Son of
God as a "second God." 1 So it was with the pious
but somewhat stupid prophet Hernias, of Rome.
He too means well and gives fervent exhortations
to his fellow Christians through the medium of his
visions. But again he is not at all a clear thinker,
and his phraseology is loose. But all the while the
Christian churches in the different cities were closely
knit together and intensely conscious of unity.
Thus as we survey the early period we seem to see
the Church as a whole standing before the world,
with grand moral steadfastness and an intense sense
of practical security in its tradition of religious
belief and practice, but subjected to an intellectual
cross-questioning of a very puzzling kind. Will you
admit this ? Do you believe that ? Will you
accept this suggestion ? Will you accommodate

1 See below, p. 242.

MISTAKES OF EARLY WRITERS 201

yourself to that popular theory ? And the Church
made many mistakes in its haste, and corrected
them somewhat painfully at its leisure. Only
gradually and hardly did it fashion its terminology,
chiefly by the help of certain men who relatively
deserve the title of great men : Irenaeus, 1 whose
intellectual perceptions were very sure ; Tertullian,
the African, who was much more brilliant and also
much more rhetorical and one-sided ; and Origen
of Alexandria, who, in spite of certain very precarious
speculations and excursions into the unknowable,
was the greatest of all.

Now it is obvious that this process cannot be
described in detail in one chapter in a small volume.
I propose to make only one or two general observa-
tions before we approach the age when the Church,
in formal councils, gave certain dogmatic definitions
of its doctrine of the person of Christ, to which we
must pay more precise attention.

The chief intellectual difficulties of the Church
were (1) with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity
that is especially the relation of the Son, conceived
of as an eternal and divine person, to God the Father
and to the Holy Spirit. It was in this region that
it found the greatest difficulty in fixing its termin-

1 See on Irenaeus Belief in God, p. 47. Dr. Rashdall has
strangely accused him of what later was called Apollinarianism
(see Jesus Human and Divine, p. 13). But Irenaeus gives us an
account of our Lord's temptations, according to which the divine
Word left the man or the manhood in Jesus to struggle and suffer
unaided in those dark hours, ucrirep yap i\v avOpwiros, 'iva. vetpdcBr],
ovrws xal \6yos 'iva. 5oa<r07J' i]<rw%a.ovTOS /j.fv rov \6yov fv r<f> ireipae<r0cu,
etc. (iii 19, 3). The phraseology may be easily criticized. But it
certainly quite clearly means that Irenaeus thought of Christ as
having a properly human mind and will in which to be tempted
and struggle. Again, he says : " He struggled and overcame : He
was man fighting for His fathers, and by His obedience paying the
debt of their disobedience. ..." And in order to fight the human
fight fully " He passed through every age, from infancy to man-
hood, restoring to each communion with God " (iii 18, 6, 7). He
was what He seemed really man (ii 22). See my Dissertations,
pp. 108 ff. I cannot think what caused Dr. Rashdall to make such
a statement.

202 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

ology : (2) in maintaining its hold on the real
humanity of Christ. The Hellenistic world was
still possessed with the sense that the source of
spiritual contamination for souls lay in the body
and the material world, and that the redemption
of the soul lay in its exemption from matter. And
Following on this conception of matter as evil was
a horror of the idea of any real incarnation of God.
The Church could not remain uninfluenced by this
tendency. Thus we have a whole series of attempts
Docetism and all the varieties of Gnosticism to
explain away the reality of Christ's physical man-
hood ; and all such attempts appear to have met
with a great deal of sympathy and success. Ter-
tullian, looking back on the history of Gnosticism
at the beginning of the third century, can speak
of the dismal experience which the Church had
passed through of seeing " one and another, the
most faithful, the wisest, the most experienced in
the Church, going over to the wrong side." 1 Mean-
while there was comparatively little difficulty in
maintaining the originally divine nature or deity
of Christ. The popular instinct was all on this side.
The ablest opponent of this fundamental article
of faith was a brilliant but morally disagreeable
man> Paul, the bishop of Samosata, the favourite
and courtier of Zenobia, the Queen of Palmyra.
His doctrine is broadly the same as one we are
made familiar with to-day that the person Jesus
did not exist till He was born of Mary ; that the
divine Word or Wisdom (conceived of as a quality
or aspect of God and not as a person) dwelt in him
as it dwells in other men, but in a unique degree,
so as gradually to deify him, till from having been
a man he became God. The support which Zenobia
gave her favourite made it very difficult for the
local episcopate to secure his deposition. But as

1 de praescr. 3;

THE CLAIM OF THE COUNCILS 203

soon as Zenobia was defeated by the Emperor
Aurelian his strength was gone. It would seem
that he had no popular support in the Church,
though he became indirectly the parent of an in-
tellectual school of which Arianism was the fruit.

This very rough sketch must suffice to bring us
to the period of the Councils. The reason why we
must consider their dogmatic definitions is not because
they represent the action of ecclesiastical authority,
for with that at present we are not concerned, but
because, viewed historically, the teaching about the
person of Christ which we get in the New Testament,
and which we find from the first as the tradition
of the Church, seems here to reach its intellectual
expression, or at least its technical formulation.
That at least was the claim made for these formulas
that they represented no new doctrine and no
addition to the doctrine of the Bible and the tradition
of the Church, but were simply its expression in an
articulate form with a view to defending it against
the invasion of proposed interpretations of Christ
which would have fundamentally destroyed the
Church tradition in its real meaning. The question
for us is whether this is really so, or whether, on the
other hand, the definitions are encumbrances which
the faith of the New Testament would have done
better to dispense with, or which, even if they were
once necessary, are now certainly to be regarded as
antiquated expressions of the faith in terms of a
philosophy which has been long outgrown, and for
which we can surely find better substitutes in the
language of modern thought, retaining the ancient
formulas only as historical records. This is a very
insistent question to-day ; and though we are not
yet in a position to pay regard to the question of
ecclesiastical authority, we can discuss these formulas
very profitably on their merits.

204 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

II

The first occasion for an ecclesiastical dogma was
found in the heresy of Arius. He was a clever and
influential parish priest of Alexandria who was one
of the numerous pupils of a famous teacher, Lucian
of Antioch, a martyr in the Diocletian persecution
(about 311), and also the parent of an Antiochene
school of teachers, some of whom it is fair to call
rationalists. Arius' theory of the person of our Lord
was a complex one, 1 but it is mainly with one startling
feature in it that the Church concerned itself. He
affirmed that Christ was indeed the incarnation of
a pre-existent being, the Word or Son, who was
tc divine " in a popular sense and could be called
God and worshipped, but who was not really of the
nature of God the Creator. He was a creature who
had a beginning from the divine will, and was the
created medium through whom God made other
creatures. Arius, like the rest of the Church, held
fast to the old doctrine of God the Creator derived
from the prophets of Israel. He was not a pantheist.
He recognized that there can be no confusion between
the Creator and the creature. Christ in His original
nature must be either one or the other. He must
come from one side or other of the line which sepa-
rates the creative nature from the created. And
he quite definitely put Christ on the side of the
creatures. He was not of the nature of God, but He
came into existence by His will. Thus to account
for His exalted and quasi-divine character and posi-
tion, he would have had the Church regard Him
as something like a demigod or created God in His
first being, and as a divinized hero in the human

1 It is carefully described by Harnack, Hist, of Dogma (Eng.
trans.), vol. iv, cap. i, and by Robertson in his admirable Intro-
duction to the translation of Athanasius in Nicene and Post Nicene
Fathers (Parkers, Oxford, 1892).

AGAINST ARIUS 205

guise which he afterwards assumed. He seems to
have been a thorough intellectualist in love with
his own theory, and to have thrown himself zealously
and successfully into the task of propagating it.
Doubtless he saw in it a bridge by which the non-
Christian intellectual world could be persuaded to
accept Christ and worship Christ without abandoning
its own familiar categories.

This is what the Church saw from another point
of view that Arianism w r as a bold attempt to assi-
milate within the Christian Church the pagan idea
of a demigod. Arius' first opponent was his bishop,
Alexander ; and it was the commotion stirred by
Alexander's resistance to Arius which alarmed the
Emperor Constantine persuaded that this was merely
a question of words, and anxious above all things to
promote the peace of the Church in which he had
recently learned to see the hope of the empire. This
led him to try the expedient of summoning a General
Council, which should represent the bishops of all
the Christian churches of the empire, to settle the
matter. The Council met in 325 in Nicaea and
condemned Arius almost unanimously, and, as an ex-
pedient to make the condemnation effective, modified
an existing baptismal creed, especially by intro-
ducing into it the word Homoousios, " of one sub-
stance with the Father " ; w r hich henceforth became
the test word of orthodoxy, being selected, we ob-
serve, because of its exclusive power, because though
Arians would accept a word which sounded very
like it Homoiousiqs (of like substance with the
Father) they simply could not say that Father and
Son were of the same substance or reality.

This choice of a word and that a w r ord not found
in Scripture to exclude from the Christian Church a
group of men believed to be in error, but in a highly
metaphysical region, when the word which they were
prepared to accept differed from the word selected

206 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

only in a single letter, is a proceeding naturally
repulsive to moderate men at all times, and especially
to the modern Englishman. Nevertheless, we must
confess that it was necessary. To tolerate the
Arians was to tolerate both the pagan conception
of a created God or demigod, and also the conception
of a deified hero : that is to say, the Church, in
, tolerating them, would have turned its back on the
foundation of its religion its belief inherited from
the prophets of Israel that there was only one God,
and there could be none other than He, and that
none but He might be adored as God. It is only to
say the same thing in other words to say that, if
the Christian Church had not been in fundamental
error for nearly three hundred years in worshipping
Jesus the Christ as its Lord and calling Him God,
that must be because He came originally from the
other side of that unfathomable gulf which divides
the self-existent God the Creator from all His crea-
tures, even the highest because He belongs to the
only eternal reality, the being of God. The long-
persecuted Church was just being called to assume
the role of the established religion of the empire. It
was about to enter upon the tremendous charge of
guiding the half-converted tribes who were beginning
to pour over it and were destined so soon to over-
whelm it. It is very easy to see that if it had
consented, however reluctantly, to tolerate what
Arianism asked it to tolerate, polytheism, both philo-
sophical and popular, both civilized and barbarous,
would have effected its lodgment securely within
the Church. The Church did not, in fact, keep its
doctrine wholly free from deleterious matter derived
from paganism. Far from it. But if it had done
what the Arians asked of it, its belief in one only
God, one only object of worship, would have been
submerged in the flood of pagan polytheism.

I will venture to quote once more the remarkable

ATHANASIUS 207

acknowledgment on the part of Thomas Carlyle
which Froude relates J : " He made one remark
which is worth recording. In earlier years he had
spoken contemptuously of the Athanasian contro-
versy of the Christian world torn in pieces over a
diphthong ; and he would ring the changes in broad
Annandale on the Homoousion and the Homoi-
ousion. He now told me that he perceived Chris-
tianity itself to have been at stake. If the Arians had
won, it would have dwindled away to a legend."

The speedily won decision of the Council of Nicaea
proved to be a surprise rather than a victory. Owing
to a variety of political and other causes, for more
than fifty years of bewildering controversy, the fate
of its momentous decision hung in the balance. So
far as the controversy was really theological at all,
it was a struggle of religious faith holding on to a
tradition and a revelation, against an ingenious in-
tellectual theory, supported by a closely knit coterie
of scholars of the school of Lucian, and aided by a
mass of mere conservatism which was only reluctant
to accept the new word Homoousion. Athanasius,
who was the champion of orthodoxy from the time
of the Council, when he was still a deacon, till the day
of his death, makes the real nature of the struggle
constantly evident. In his first writings, when he
was a very young man, he had shown himself fas-
cinated by the current philosophy of the Logos
the divinity immanent in the world and had inter-
preted the Incarnation in the light of it. 2 But

1 Carlyle's Life in London, li 462. See also the similar judgment
in Harnack, Hist, of Dogma, iv 43 : "Had the Arian doctrine '
gained the victory, it would in all probability have completely
ruined Christianity," etc.

1 Dr. Rashdall, in Jesus Human and Divine (Melrose, 1922), p. 14,
reproduces an earlier paper in which, with astonishing emphasis,
he accused Athanasius (like Irenaeus, see above, p. 201) of being
Apollinarian : "It cannot be too strongly asserted that Athanasiua
was an Apollinarian." In a note to the republished paper, in con-
sequence of protests, he modifies his statement thus : "In his

208 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

through all the long years of conflict his philosophical
interests are almost wholly swallowed up in his
passionate but also deliberate and rational zeal for
Christianity as a religion resting on a person who
can be wholly believed in and worshipped as the
Redeemer because He is really God as well as man l
a religion, moreover, which is essentially the same
religion as had its beginnings in the Old Testament,
the religion of the one God, who is not less truly one
because He has come nearer to us in His incarnate
Son, and we have recognized a distinction as of
persons in the one divine being. Athanasius argues
elaborately and persistently, but never as a philo-
sopher contending for his theory, always as one
put in charge of a revelation and a tradition, always
with his eye fixed upon the strictly religious interests
and loyalties. It is a great mistake to speak as if

earlier days." What should we think of aii historian of to-day
who should speak of Mr. Gladstone in retrospect as " a strenuous
Tory," or of a distinguished bishop, still alive, as " a pugnacious
High Churchman," and then explain that he was referring to his
hot youth ? Dr. Rashdall then says that in the Orations there is
" no trace of any distinct recognition of a human soul in Jesus,"
and that his later distinct repudiations of Apollinarianism were
" formal " and " that it may be doubted how far this admission
really affected his general way of thinking."

The truth behind all this is that the circumstances of current
controversy and the tone of the Alexandrian atmosphere both alike
tended towards a one-sided emphasis on the Godhead of Christ, as
compared with the manhood. But Athanasius was on his guard.
I have quoted in my Dissertations, pp. 122-6, many passages
from the Orations dealing with our Lord's assertion that He did not
kitow (Mark xiii 32) and similar texts. Athanasius' explanation
of the texts may be regarded as more or as less satisfactory. But,
at any rate, they make it quite evident that he recognized in our
Lord's manhood, or " flesh," a human mind which must be in
itself limited and susceptible of progress and liable to ignorance.
This is plain through the whole course of his controversial life, as
well as in his later utterances when Apollinarianism was specifically
in question. No doubt Athanasius was always reluctant to give
up old friends on account of their excesses, whether Apollinarins
or Marcellus. But he was himself precisely not Apollinarian.

1 Harnack and Robertson give us excellent accounts of
Athanasius' doctrine, and Dr. Bright (Church of the Fathers) is
ncomparable in his vivid estimate of Athanasius as a person.

AGAINST APOLLINARIUS 209

the outlook of the Church in the matter was mainly
philosophical. All that the Church did was to choose
the best available term to express the truth that
Christ was God, and that there could not be any
being conceived of or worshipped as God except
the one God without abandoning the foundation of
the revelation on which the Church rested. Certainly
Athanasius against Arius stands for permanent and
practical religion against an intellectual theory which
in fact turned out to be a very transitory phase of
philosophy indeed.

Ill

But before the death of Athanasius the balance of
interest had shifted from one aspect of the person
of the Redeemer to the other from His Godhead ,
to His manhood. A hundred years earlier Origen
had prefaced his most speculative book on The
Principles of Things by pointing out that there was
a Christian tradition which it was the first business
of the Church to hand down, and that (among other
necessary points) it proclaimed a Christ who was
both eternally and permanently God and also, by
His incarnation, really man. In the traditional
religion of the mass of the Christian people it was in
ancient days always rather the belief in His manhood
that was in peril than that in His Godhead. But
the Church's duty was always to be true to the double
idea or double fact and, in spite of one-sided ten-
dencies, it fulfilled this duty. This is illustrated by
the history of the Councils. One of the most zealous
of the Athanasians and one of the ablest, Apollinarius
of Laodicea, in his zeal to maintain the moral per-
fection and immutability of Christ, embraced the
notion that in Christ the divine reason and will took
the place of the changeable human will and fallible
human reason. So that the manhood of Christ

210 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

which He took at the Incarnation was not a full and
complete manhood, but a manifestation of the divine
reason veiling itself and expressing itself in a human
flesh and animal soul, or principle of life. 1 This
idea, which ought indeed to startle anyone who has
read the Gospels, including the account of the tempta-
tion and of the agony in Gethsemane, Apollinarius
made more plausible apparently by the idea that in
the divine Word lies the eternal archetype of all
created things, 2 and in particular of human nature,
which was made in the image of God so that the
eternal Word can even be spoken of as the archetypal
or eternal man, and we may suppose that He was
always destined to act as man in a human body.
But there is a good deal of uncertainty about the date
and the nature of this refinement.

It must be confessed that zeal for the full meaning
of the manhood of Christ was not a very conspicuous
characteristic of Greek theologians. Nevertheless,
when thus challenged by Apollinarius the Church
was true to itself. The Council of Constantinople
the history of which is very obscure in many respects
certainly followed the lead of an earlier Council
at Alexandria and condemned the Apollinarians, but
without any special definition. When the Council
was later reckoned for ecumenical, this 3 was what
it was chiefly credited with that it had affirmed
that the Church must proclaim a Christ who was not
only truly God but also perfectly and completely
man, with all the complement of properly human
faculties, spiritual as well as physical. Once again

1 He adopted the psychological theory which would describe
man as made up of body, soul, and spirit.

* The Fathers mostly read John i 3, 4 as " Without him [the
Word] was not anything made. That which hath been made was
[eternally] life in him."

3 As also that it gave completed expression to the doctrine of the
Trinity by bringing the Holy Spirit as well as the Son under the
term Homoou-sios.

AGAINST NESTORIUS 211

the Church had behaved, not as a group of philo-
sophers or psychologists seeking to frame a satis-
fying theory of Christ's person, but as the trustees
for a religion rooted in historical facts, bound to
the full reality of Christ the man.

To-day it is not necessary to argue the case against
Apollinarius. All our modern Lives of Christ, and
books about Christ, give the fullest interpretation
to His manhood and call attention to the over-
whelming evidence which the Gospels give us of the
human spirit reason and will and feeling in Jesus.
Present-day enthusiasm is all for the full manhood.
The question with us is only whether this reality of j
His manhood is consistent with personal Godhead.
In ancient days, however, Apollinarius and His
followers found much more popular sympathy than
those who were accused of denying the personal
Godhead of Christ.

IV

Then once more the balance shifts. There was a
school of theologians, already alluded to, who had
their centre at Antioch and did honour to Lucian
as their master, amongst whom the most famous
names were those of Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore
of Mopsuestia. They were scholars with w r hom
modern Englishmen would have natural sympathy.
Their zeal was for a critical and historical interpre-
tation of the sacred books, and for the reality of
the manhood of Christ. In strenuous opposition
to the tendencies of Alexandria, and especially of
Apollinarius, they emphasized the freedom of Christ's
; human will and the reality of His human growth
: and human limitations in mind as well as body,
! even to the point of postulating for Him, as it seemed,
an independent human personality, at any rate to
start with. The " connection " between the divine

212 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

Word or Son and the human person of Jesus, the
adopted Son, was, in their estimation, so close as
to involve actual identification of the man Jesus
with the Son of God. But this was apparently
a gradual process and was the reward of a con-
tinually fuller moral perfection. Fundamentally and
originally the man Jesus was a separate person from
the eternal Son.

One of the disciples of this school, Nestorius,
a fiery and pugnacious character, became Bishop
of Constantinople in A.D. 428. His " chaplain,"
Anastasius, took an early opportunity vehemently
to repudiate the term theotokos which it was cus-
tomary to apply to the Blessed Virgin Mary, signi-
fying precisely that her infant Son was personally
God. " Let no one," he cried, " call Mary Theotokos ;
for Mary was but a woman ; and it is impossible that
God should be born of a woman." Nestorius threw
himself into the defence of the Antiochene doctrine in
special antagonism to the influences from Alexandria,
where the great Cyril was archbishop. In particular,
he was said to have committed himself to the assertion
that " the child of two or three months old I cannot
call God." At once a tumult arose in the Church,
and controversy was fierce. Few things in the
history of the Church have probably harmed it more
than the bitterness and uncharitableness of its con-
troversialists. Nestorius was bitter. But what has
mostly harmed the Church was the bitterness of its
protagonist Cyril. And there is no question that the
theology he poured forth was distinctly one-sided
and ill calculated to satisfy the reasonable scruples
of the Antiochenes. But with these matters we are
not here concerned. Nor are we really concerned
with the question whether, after all, Nestorius ulti-
mately meant to deny what the Church was at pains
to affirm. There is now ground for believing that,
had he lived a few years longer, he might have been

THEOTOKOS 213

satisfied to accept the decision of the Council of
Chalcedon in 451, in which he could have recognized
the safeguarding of what he valued. 1

But the obscurity of many of the details of the
controversy, and the painfully uncharitable tone of
it, which leaves a most disagreeable impression on
our minds, cannot be allowed to obscure the real
importance of the issue. The Creed of Nicaea
affirmed that it was the eternal Son of God, Himself
very God, who for us men and for our salvation had
come down and taken flesh of Mary and been born
and suffered for us. And long before Nicaea that
was the passionate faith of the Church. It was
really God, the eternal Son, who was born of Mary,
and who lived and died under conditions of a real
humanity. And this continuity of personality was
the very thing which Nestor ius seemed to deny.
Thus once more a Council, reckoned as ecumenical,
was held at Ephesus in 431, and Nestorius was
violently condemned and the title Theotokos, as
applied to the mother of Jesus that is, strictly,
" the bearer of God " was made obligatory for
acceptance by the officers and teachers of the Church.
And I do not think it can be doubted that here again
the Church, in refusing to admit that Jesus was a
separate person from the Son of God, and affirming,
on the contrary, that it was the same person the
Word or Son who was eternally in the being of
God and through whom all things were made, who
was born as a baby of Mary and lived and died upon
the Cross in affirming this and denying its contrary
the Church was certainly only reaffirming the doctrine
of St. Paul and St. John and the Epistle to the
Hebrews.

1 On the subtle and difficult question what Diodore, Theodore,
and Nestorius actually and precisely meant to affirm and deny,
I would refer to the very just summary, as it seems to me, given by
Dr. Kiclcl in his just published History of the Church, vol. iii, chaps.
xi and xii.
15

214 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

The spiritual importance of the question at issue
may be made more apparent by four considerations.

(1) The sum and substance of Christian redemp-
tion lies in the real union of Christians with Jesus,
the man who lived and worked and suffered on
earth and now reigns in heaven. And the point is
that in being made one with Him baptized into
Him and receiving into ourselves His very life, His
flesh and blood we are really made one, not with
any created or intermediate person, but with God
Himself. And it is only because He is verily and
personally God that His manhood can have imparted
to it this capacity for universal participation and
assimilation. St. Cyril is always recurring to this
point.

(2) Christians from the beginning, and notably
St. Paul, have insisted upon the pre-eminence and
uniqueness of the self-sacrifice of Christ. Now r ,
judged by an objective standard, the measure of
Christ's self-sacrifice within the limits of His mortal
life cannot be said to be greater, at any rate, than
that of multitudes of martyrs. But it is not within
these limits that the uniqueness of Christ's self-
sacrifice is found. It lies in the region of His pre-
existent life. It consists in this, that one who
existed in the glory of God consented to abandon
this to us inconceivable glory of life, in order to
accept the conditions and limitations and sufferings
of real manhood. This act of self -sacrifice is strictly
unique, and it is so only because the person who
sacrifices Himself is very God not closely united to
God but personally God. His acts are strictly God's
acts and His love God's love.

(3) Herein lies also the clue to the finality of the
Christ. Intellectually considered, nothing is more
essential to a full faith in Christ than this recognition
of His essential finality to which we shall have to
recur later on. This means that He is not only the

THE PRINCIPLE AT STAKE 215

greatest prophet and the most conspicuous saint
and the noblest leader of humanity who has ever
lived ; for if that were all, obviously we could
" look for another " as great as He, possibly greater
than He. And if Jesus be, as at the last analysis
Nestorianism always asserts, a human person, one
among millions of human persons, whom the divine
Word united to Himself and even (finally) absorbed
into Himself, there is no reason in the nature of
things why the process should not be repeated. It
is, in fact, only the highest example of what occurs
in its measure in every good man. There may be
another Christ, even conceivably a higher and more
enlightened one. There is no real ground for
asserting the finality of the Christ, unless He be
personally God in manhood. Then, and then only,
must He be essentially and necessarily final. For
there can be no disclosure of God in manhood or
of manhood in God even conceivable which should
be completer or fuller (at least under the conditions
of this world) than is given us in Him who is the
Word made flesh. Nor in the nature of things can
there be another such. There can be no other such
person as the only-begotten Son of God.

(4) This, too, is important the " Nestorian "
conception is exceedingly difficult to grasp with
precision. It is deeply evasive intellectually con-
sidered, and appears to pass from one form to another.
But the Creed of the Church is a creed for common
men, and must be able to express itself, in those
points for which it claims popular acceptance, in
broad affirmations broad as well as true. The
orthodox creed that for us men and for our salva-
tion very God, the Son of God, consented to come
down from the bosom of the Father to become man
and for us to die has this broad intelligibility.

But freed from refinements and reduced to a like
broad intelligibility, it is impossible to doubt that
the teaching^ of Nestorius would have inevitably

216 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

taken shape in the proclamation of Jesus as the
deified man, 1 which from every point of view would
have been a disaster.

Once more, and for the last time, the balance
shifts. It is now an old Constantinopolitan monk
called Eutyches, , who affirmed that though God-
head and manhood w r ere separate before the Incar-
nation, yet in Jesus the manhood was in some
sense absorbed and swallowed up in the Godhead.
There was a widespread tendency towards this sort
of " monophysitism "this doctrine of the absorp-
tion of the manhood in the Godhead and the
Eastern Church might easily have overbalanced on
that side. But the West, in the person of the great
Leo, Bishop of Rome, put its weight on the other
side, and at Chalcedon, in 451, the last of the great
definitions was made which affirmed that the man-
hood remained in Christ, not only complete, but
permanently unconfused that as Christ was con-
substantial with God according to His Godhead, so
He became and remained consubstantial with us
according to His manhood. So the doctrine was
fixed that in Christ incarnate there is one person
and that divine, but two natures, divine and human,
the one original and the other voluntarily assumed
by incarnation but permanent and distinct. This
the Chalcedonian may be considered in principle
the final definition of the Church. If a century later
the Church had occasion to affirm that in Christ was
the reality of a human will, and the whole rational
activity of manhood, that was only a reaffirmation

1 If Nestorianism among Syrians and Assyrians has not taken
any such shape it is, I think, because their so-called Nestorianism
is really not Nestorianism at all, but in part simply a difficulty of
language and in part loyalty to a persecuted leader.

AGAINST EUTYCHES 217

important enough in itself of what was really
secured in principle by the definitions which excluded
Apollinarianism and Eutychianism.

VI

We need pursue the history of ecclesiastical dogma
no further. In this volume we are in no way con-
cerned with any question of the authority which
these decrees have as dogmas of the Church. The
whole idea of Church authority will be ignored till
we reach the subject of the Church in the next
volume. At present we are simply taking these
decrees as important facts in the historical develop-
ment of the doctrine of the person of Christ. And
we cannot fail to be conscious that they have at
different periods, and especially to-day, been the
subject of widespread criticism in intellectual circles,
often violently and contemptuously expressed,
especially at their culminating point in the formula
of Chalcedon which demands our acceptance of the
conception of Christ as throughout, from eternity to
eternity, one and the same divine person, who
nevertheless, as incarnate and made man, subsists
in two distinct natures, divine and human. Now,
(1) the " nature " includes the will and the conscious-
ness ; and we are here (the critics tell us) postulating
in the human Christ two wills and consciousnesses,
lying (so to speak) side by side in the same person
a very impossible conception whereas in the Gospels
what we are witnesses of is one person, Jesus the
Christ, with one will and consciousness, the con-
sciousness and will of a Son, in presence of another
will and consciousness, that of His Father who is
in heaven ; and there is no suggestion of a dualism
of wills or consciousnesses in His own person.

(2) The identity of the divine personality through-
out seems to involve the idea of Christ's manhood

218 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

as " impersonal." So the theologians have con-
stantly called it. But it is a wholly unacceptable
idea. It is precisely in Jesus, " the Son of Man,"
that we seem to see all the characteristics of human
personality at their highest.

Now it must be acknowledged that these are
very important criticisms which, as we hear them,
strike home with a powerful sense of truth. And
there is another^ of a different kind which urges
that the Councils* were in their definitions, by the
use of such words as " substance," " person,"
" nature," tying the Christian religion to a tem-
porary phase of philosophy which is past and gone,
and from which it had better now shake itself
free.

I would seek to give these criticisms, what they
clearly deserve, the most candid consideration,
which shall be quite free, that is, shall at present
quite ignore the questions of the ecclesiastical
authority claimed for these decisions.

1. The only true and historical way of regard-
ing these dogmatic decisions is to regard them as
primarily negative. Their motive was not any
1 positively felt need of interpreting or defining the
faith as a thing good in itself, but simply the
pressing necessity for excluding certain very power-
fully supported intellectual theories which were
at work and which were calculated to undermine
the traditions of faith worship and practice which
the Church was set to maintain what it called
" the tradition." It must be admitted that the
love of intellectual definition for its own sake took
possession to a dangerous extent of the Church
both in East and West. But these " intellectual
exercises " have not crystallized as disciplinary
decrees. It is important to notice that Athanasius,
and the Fathers generally, take a very restricted
view of the legitimate functions of the Church with

THE FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH 219

regard to Christian doctrine. Athanasius contrasts
it with its functions in respect of discipline. In this
latter region it claims to issue directions on its own
authority. Thus the Council of Nicaea with regard
to the Easter festival said simply that " it seemed
good (e'Sofe) " to the bishops to give such and such
directions. But with regard to doctrine it is much
more modest. " With reference to the faith they
wrote not ' such and such things were determined,'
but 4 thus the Catholic Church believes.' And they
added immediately the statement of their faith,
to show that their judgment was not new but
apostolic, and that what they wrote was not any
discovery of theirs, but was what the apostles
taught." x And, as a matter of fact, St. Athanasius
in his almost endless argumentations hardly ever
refers to the decision of the Council, but prefers to
conduct all his argument in the region of scripture
and the necessities of practical religion and reason.
And in this he is not singular. It is so with almost
all the Fathers. A dogmatic decision was for them
certainly a regrettable necessity, only justifiable
under extreme need.

2. But I think that, for reasons already given,
we are bound to admit that in the case of each of
the four great councils the decision at which it
arrived to exclude certain lines of teaching or pro-
posed explanations of the person of Christ was a
necessary decision really necessary if the faith of
the New Testament was to be maintained. As I
have said, to admit as tolerable the Arian explanation
of Christ as in effect a demi-god, and thus to re-
pudiate the whole basis of strict monotheism, which
inspires both Old and New Testaments, would have
ruined Christianity, by assimilating it to insurgent
Paganism. It was just as necessary, if the faith
of St. Paul and St. John was to be maintained,

1 De Synodis, c. 5.

220 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

decisively to exclude any teaching which funda-
mentally distinguished the person of Jesus from the
person of the Son of God, and thereby converted
"incarnation" into " indwelling," and substantially
assimilated Christ to prophets and saints. In the
other direction it was certainly as necessary to ex-
clude the ideas which w r ould have rendered Christ's
manhood fundamentally unreal, especially in respect
of just those regions of mind and will and spirit in
which man is distinctively man. It was, in fact,
in view T of the ecclesiastical tendencies of the day,
a miracle of grace that the Church took so firm a
stand against Apollinarius and the Monophysites,
though it is precisely this that involved it in the
postulate of the two natures to which we shall return
directly. I see no reason to doubt that if St. Paul
and St. John could have had the situation explained
to them, they would have accepted the necessity
for the definitions.

3. Though, as I have said, we constantly read
highly critical and even contemptuous estimates of
the terminology of the Councils, I do not see that
they could have found at the time better words in
which to embody their decisions, nor have I ever
seen any better modern terms suggested. In fact
the critics do not generally suggest that the work
was badly done for its time, but they suggest that
the Councils used (as they were bound to use) the
philosophical categories and terms of their day, and
that these categories and terms have been outgrown.

But it is very necessary to protest that the Church
was not professing to act philosophically. It chose
the term " of one substance " to exclude the idea
that Christ was not really God and then to e::clude
the idea that He was not really man. As the Church
used the term it was acting with practical statesman-
ship and discrimination, rather than with philo-
sophical accuracy : for it is plain that " unity of

THE CHOICE OF TERMS 221

substance" is used in rather different senses when
it is applied to describe (1) the relation of Christ to
the Father and (2) His relation to His fellow men.
Its aim was practical. So again it was practical
necessity which led to its doing the world a great
service that is, selecting an old word which hitherto
had meant no more than " substance " (i.e. hypostasis)
and stamping it with the distinctive meaning of
" person," an idea for which hitherto Greek and
Latin philosophy had had no term. Once more,
if it was, as I think it was, essential that the Church
should maintain that the Creator and His creatures
God and man belong to kinds of reality which
are essentially different, I do not see that it could
have chosen a better word to use than " nature,"
when it affirmed in Christ's one person two
" natures," the one original and the other acquired.
I do not see then how the way in which the Church
did its defensive or self -protective work, so far as
the choice of its terminology is concerned, could
have been bettered. Nor do I see how the
terminology in question could be bettered to-day,
so long as it is granted that the idea to be expressed
is that of the incarnation in a real and full manhood
of one who belonged to the eternal being of God, as
a Son with His Father. On the contrary it has
always appeared to me fairly evident that what
the critics want is not better terms to express the
same idea, but the substitution of a different idea
either the substitution of what is fundamentally
the pantheistic conception of God, according to
which God and man are parts of the one substance,
in place of the essentially different Biblical idea
of God the Creator distinct from His creatures,
or the substitution of the idea of a God-indwelt
man for that of the incarnate God.

Of course, I know that there is a philosophy which
deprecates the whole idea of the existence of real

222 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

objects or things having distinctive qualities or
natures, created by God and in a measure really
knowable by us, and of persons made in the image
of God, and therefore having a different nature
from mere things and animals, and of God as the
only self-subsistent and self-complete being, the
Creator of all that is. What this philosophy suggests
to us as the ultimate reality is (to use Lord Balfour's
language) " an identity wherein all differences
vanish, or a unity which includes, but does not
transcend, the differences which it somehow holds
in solution." But this sort of philosophy is not
the only Idealism. And it has to reckon with the
sort of Realism which the common sense of man-
kind as well as the theology of the Bible postulates.
And granted the sort of Realism which believes in
real objects having distinctive natures, and in real
persons, and in a real God the Creator, I do not think
the terminology of the councils can be easily bettered.
4. But the best things can be most lamentably
abused ; and it is manifest in history that the
Greek genius, which exercised itself rightfully within
the Christian Church in defining and protecting
the fundamental faith of Christendom, became
enamoured of its own intellectualism and to a
lamentable extent distorted the true character and
estimate of the Christian religion. For the Christian
religion is a way of life " the way " was the first
name for the Church. This " w r ay " involves and
depends upon a certain self-disclosure of God and
certain ideas about the destiny and capacity of man
and his sin and need of redemption. Thus it requires
a Creed, and it is idle to regret the necessity. It
must perforce have formulated and defended the
intellectual principles on which its way of life
depends. But it ought always to have presented
itself to mankind first of all as a way of life. While
in fact, under the dominant influence of Greek

MISUSE OF THE DOGMAS 223

intellectualism, the interest in the intellectual pro-
positions and formulas became the foremost interest,
and the Church presented itself to the world, not as
a society called to live a life, but as a society main-
taining a very elaborate system of doctrines, the
propagation of which was its chief business. This
is the impression we get in history of the later Greek
Church, though the impression made by its mystics
and saints must not be forgotten. And a similar
intellectualism may be charged against the Western
schoolmen, even though Erasmus and his friends
did not by any means judge them fairly.

Under such conditions the misuse made of the
definitions of the Church is of this kind. They ought
to have been regarded as simply warning men off
certain misleading and one-sided lines of logical
development, leaving them to get their positive
picture of Christ from the Gospels, and their positive
theory from the books of the New Testament. That,
as we have seen, was the real intention of Athanasius
and others of the Fathers. They talk very little
about the definitions. All their argument good
and bad is upon the ground of Scripture and
occasionally of tradition, and of the meaning of the
sacraments and the requirements of the spiritual
life. But another tendency is also apparent and
in effect prevails. The dogmatic decisions become
premises to argue from, and Christ is represented
not as He was, but as, it was thought, He must
have been. Thus, because it is laid down that there
are to be recognized in Christ the two distinct
natures, divine and human, what it is not unfair
to call a fancy picture of Christ is drawn, as acting
now in one nature and now in another, now as God
and now as man, which does not really correspond
to the picture in the Gospel. Again, it comes to be
argued that because He was God, therefore He must
have been continuously omniscient, and such a plain

224 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

statement as " Of that day and that hour knoweth
no one, no, not the Son," is explained away to mean
that He did not choose to reveal what He really
knew. " The truth," as Theodoret grimly observed,
" tells a lie." Later all that belongs to human
limitations mental growth, anxiety, faith, hope,
even prayer in the real sense is excluded from His
consciousness as inconsistent with His Godhead.
The intellectual dogmas, instead of serving their
original and legitimate purpose, have become the
premises from which conclusions are drawn as to
what the Incarnate must have been, which practically
obscure the picture in the Gospels. So we feel it
to be with the later scholastic theologians. The
reality of our Lord's humanity, so far as the life of
His soul was concerned, becomes almost obliterated. 1

Or again, because the dogmatic decision against
Nestorius laid it down that there was one continuous
personality and that divine, the phrase becomes
current that the humanity of Christ was " im-
personal," 2 whereas in the Gospels we feel that
we have a picture of the Son of Man intensely in-
dividual and unmistakably personal in His manhood.

5. But the abuse of a thing does not prove that
it has no use. The definitions of the Councils were
no doubt misused, but we have seen reason to believe
that they were necessary, and that the lines of
thought which they were intended to exclude were
really destructive of the foundations of the Christian
faith. The best way to test their legitimacy is to
inquire whether, accepting them as limits to our
thinking, w r e are able to accept at its full value and
fairly interpret the picture which the Gospels present
to us of the Son of Man. As we have seen, it is not
the picture of a mere man with a merely human
consciousness or a merely prophetic claim. It cannot

1 See on all this my Dissertations, pp. 154 ff.

* I quite recognize the truth which the phrase is meant to convey
(see below, p. 227). It is not used in the formula of Chalcedon.

THE SELF-EMPTYING 225

be so interpreted in any one of the Gospels. Only
the incarnation doctrine of St. Paul and St. John
can really interpret it. On the other hand, the
divine person in the Gospels is certainly presented
to us as growing in wisdom, as being tempted, as
asking questions, apparently for information, as
praying, as overwhelmed with anxiety, as asking
upon the Cross the great question of the perplexed
and dismayed all the world over, and finally, as,
at least in one respect, asserting His ignorance.
And, negatively, He never show r s any sign of tran-
scending the knowledge of natural things possible
to His age, country, and condition. How can these
facts be reconciled with His personal Godhead ?

I see no help in solving this question so great
as is supplied by two phrases in which St. Paul
characterizes the act of the Son of God in taking
our manhood 1 "he beggared himself" (or "made
himself poor"), and "he emptied himself" or
" annulled himself." St. Paul, in using these words,
is not thinking of any particular aspect of the human
life of Jesus, such as the limitation of His know-
ledge ; but he regards the Incarnation in itself as
having involved in some sense the abandonment
of " riches " which belonged to the previous divine
state of the Son. It is when we look at the facts in
the Gospel that we are led to welcome St. Paul's
words as giving us the clue to what we see there.
The divine Son in becoming man must, we conclude,
have accepted, voluntarily and deliberately, the
limitations involved in really living as man even
as sinless and perfect man in feeling as a man,
thinking as a man, striving as a man, being anxious
and tried as a man. Jesus does not indeed appear
in the Gospels as unconscious of His divine nature.
He knows He is Son of the Father. He " remembers "
how He came from God and would go back to God.
But He appears none the less as accepting the
1 2 Cor. viii 9, Phil, ii 7.

226 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

limitations of manhood. And St. Paul, I say, gives
us the hint which directs our vision. This was no
failure of power. God is love, and love is sympathy
and self-sacrifice. The Incarnation is the supreme
act of self-sacrificing sympathy, by which one whose
nature is divine was enabled to enter into human
experience. He emptied Himself of divine preroga-
tives so far as was involved in really becoming man,
and growing, feeling, thinking and suffering as man.

No doubt such a conception raises questions to
which we can find no full answer. Thus Is the
self-emptying to be conceived of as a continual
refusal to exercise the free divine consciousness which
He possessed, or as something once for all involved
in the original act by which He entered into the
limiting conditions of manhood ? And I think if
we are wise we shall not attempt to answer the
question. We have not the knowledge of the inner
life of Jesus which would make an answer possible.
Or again, we are asked how we relate this " limited "
condition of the Son as incarnate with His exercise
of all the cosmic functions of the eternal Word
what the New Testament calls " the sustaining " or
" bearing along of all things " or the holding all the
universe of things together- and again I think
we had better give no answer. All that appears
evident is that it was the eternal Son who was
manifested in human nature as Jesus of Nazareth,
and that within the sphere and limit of His mortal
life He appears as restricted by human conditions ;
and we thankfully accept this supreme example of
humility and self-sacrifice, without attempting to
relate it to what lies outside our possibilities of
knowledge. 1 We do well to be agnostics, if we put
our agnosticism in the right place.

1 I have endeavoured to enter at greater length into this question
in Dissertations, ii, where I have also given full quotations from
the Fathers.

THE SELF-LIMITATION OF GOD 227

Now the recognition that the Incarnation involved
this limitation in the exercise of divine faculties,
within its sphere, is quite consistent with the terms
of the ecclesiastical definitions. We are bound to
recognize the nature of God and the nature of Man
as both belonging throughout to the person of the
Christ, and as in their essence distinct. Only that
power of self-limitation and self-adaptation in God
which we have already recognized as in a measure
involved in creation, and especially in the creation
of free spirits, 1 we should here, in Jesus Christ,
recognize again as brought to bear with a fresh
intensity to make the Incarnation really possible,
spiritually as well as physically. Just as we believe
that now in the heavenly places Christ is still truly
man, but that the manhood is all radiant with God-
head : so in His earthly state we should believe
that Christ was really God and so knew Himself,
but that Godhead was submitting itself to the
limitations of manhood. As St. Cyril puts it : " He
suffered the limits of humanity to prevail in His
case." 2

But we must surely repudiate that mode of speech
which prevailed at the time of Chalcedon and later,
whereby the life of Christ on earth was represented as
containing two consciousnesses and two wills, so to
speak, juxtaposited in distinction the one from the
other, so that He thought and spoke and acted now
as God and now as man. We should repudiate this,
because we feel that the Gospels present us with
one who is, and knows Himself to be, always and
in all things the Son of God, but who is throughout
existing, acting, and speaking under the conditions
and limitations of manhood.

Also we should deprecate the unguarded use of a
phrase which became current among theologians
we mean the phrase which describes Christ's man-

1 See Belief in God, pp. 115-17. * Dissert., p. 146.

HRDADV CT A* A nv'r rr\\ i

228 DEFINITIONS OF COUNCILS

hood as " impersonal." All that this really means
is that the manhood had no separate personality.
There was only one person the eternal Word
who exists eternally in God, who was active in the
whole universe, and who at last was incarnate in
Jesus Christ. But when He took the manhood,
complete in all human faculties and activities, He
became to it the centre of personality. He made it
personal. Thus ^the humanity of Jesus in the
Gospels has nothing of abstract universality about
it. It is no mere veil of the Godhead. It is, indeed,
intensely individual. And if man, in distinction
from all other creatures, was originally made in the
divine image and likeness, we can understand how
the divine person can become the ego or subject
of the manhood in Jesus without its thereby ceasing
to be human. 1

I do not then think that the Chalcedonian formula,
summarizing the decisions of the Councils, requires
revision in itself ; but if we would justify it, we must
recognize very frankly that the purpose of the dogmas
was negative to exclude certain fundamentally
misleading interpretations of the person of Christ
and we must insist that for our positive conception
of the person of Jesus we need constantly to study
with unembarrassed eyes the picture in the Gospels
and the doctrine of the Epistles.

NOTE A, sec p. 198

(1) " The Shepherd :> of Hermas.

(2) The " Didache."

(3) The " Odes of Solomon."

(I) "The Shepherd" of Hermas. Undue attention
has, I think, so far as his theology is concerned, been
given to this interesting prophet of the early Roman
Church. He is interesting as a prophet interesting on

1 See further appended note B, p. 230.

HERMAS AND DIDACHE 229

account of his visions, which he and others believed to
be inspired, and on account of the enthusiasm which
he threw into the message from God given him to
deliver. His importance lies in the ethical region. He
shows that the Church, or that part of the Church
which accepted him as a prophet, still clearly viewed
the Christian religion as " the way." Its main interest
was moral. The theological background of Hernias'
visions was not apparently scrutinized. If we do
scrutinize it, it must be confessed that his theology is
confused and confusing. He certainly believed in the
incarnation of the Son of God, Who " was older than
any creature," through whom all things were made and
in whom they are sustained. He is thus certainly no
Ebionite or humanitarian in his estimate of Christ.
But he is very confusing in the language he uses about
the Holy Spirit and holy spirits, and about the relation
of the Son and the Spirit, whom he sometimes seems
to identify, and he may be accused of " Apollinarian "
language about the flesh of Christ. I think the best
account of him is still Dorner's. But the fact is he was
no theologian, and his careless language is such as
must almost inevitably have occurred before the days
when doctrine was formulated.

(2) The teaching of the Twelve Apostles still appears to
me to be a very early and very Judaic document which
must represent some group of Christian communities
quite outside the main streams of Christian influence,
who must, moreover, have lost contact with the main
streams early, and remained uninfluenced by the ideas
of St. Paul and St. John. Its ethical teaching is not
like that of St. James. It barely deserves to be called
Christian. The document does not supply any clear
indication of a doctrine of Christ's person. But it
includes the direction to baptize " in the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," which
implies the doctrine of the Son as a divine person.

(3) The " Odes of Solomon. 11 The beautiful mysticism
of these odes, which Dr. Rendel Harris discovered and
published some fourteen years ago (Cambridge Press),
implies (see especially Ode 41) a quasi- Johannine
doctrine of Christ (see p. 76).

16

230 THE PERSON OF CHRIST

(4) As has been already remarked, the Ebionites, i.e.
that obscure section of Judaistic Christians who definitely
rejected the doctrine of Christ as a divine person
incarnate, represent a later deterioration. They cannot
be quoted as if they represented the belief of St. James :
see Hort, Judaistic Christianity, p. 200 ; and B. I.
Kidd, History of the Christian Church (Oxford, 1922),
i, pp. 85-103.

NOTE B, see p. 228
The Term " Enhypostasia "

We should be very grateful to Dr. H. M. Relton for
his most suggestive and excellent Study in Christology,
and to Dr. Headlam for his preface to that study.
Dr. Relton has done good service in seeking to familiarize
us with the term enhypostasia, to which Leontius of
Byzantium sought to give currency, to express the idea
that the manhood of Jesus found its personality in the
personality of the Son of God. Leontius holds a very
important place in the sixth century as resisting the
current tendency to monophysitism, even inside the
orthodox church. I have tried to bring this out in
Dissertations, iii (see quotation, p. 277, and references in
index under the heading Leontius). May I venture,
however, to deprecate the attempt of Dr. Relton to
revive the idea of Apollinarius that we are to ascribe
an eternal humanity to the Word, before His incarnation.
I suppose that there is some deep sense in which it must
be true that all created things have their eternal counter-
part in the Word, and humanity amongst them. But
this applies to all created things. And we do well not
to be " wise above that which is written." There is
nothing in Scripture suggesting an eternal manhood in
God nothing at least that is not more adequately
represented by the idea that man pre-eminently was
made in the divine image. And this is enough to
explain how God could take our manhood.

CHAPTER VIII

THE IMPLIED DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY

IT has already become apparent that the Christian
faith in Jesus as the Son of God or Word of God
incarnate involves a belief that the being of God is
not so " simple " as the Jews, with their less intimate
knowledge of God, had supposed. He is still the
44 one Lord and His name one " ; but this unity is
found to contain a distinction within itself first
of all the distinction of Father and Son, which had
not been made evident at first. 1 God had, so to
speak, come nearer to men in Jesus Christ, to redeem
them, and more of His inner being had shown itself
to the discerning minds of men in the process. It
is very important to take note that belief in the
Holy Trinity was not the result of any philosophical
or speculative movement among the Christians.

There have been in the world speculative philo-
sophies which have arrived at some sort of Trini-
tarian belief. Thus we read of an Indian Trinity-
Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva and of a Trinity in the
later Greek (Neo-Platonist) philosophy Ihe One,

1 Whatever anticipations of Trinitarian doctrine have been ,
discovered by Christian theologians in the Old Testament were
certainly not apparent to the Jews. I have already had occasion
to speak of the development in later Jewish thought of the
"wisdom " or " word " of God, as alive and operative in nature,
in terms almost suggestive of distinct personality. But this*
suggestion never became explicit among them.

231

232 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY

Reason, and Soul. The former of these doctrines of
Trinity was an intellectual attempt to construct a
bridge between the Absolute One and the many
gods of popular belief, and also an attempt to
harmonize hostile cults 1 ; and the latter was the
result of a purely philosophical attempt to analyse
existence into its elements. But the Christians,
without any philosophical intention at all, and with-
out any speculative interest, found themselves
believing in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as a result
of their experiences as the disciples of Jesus. The
name of God had become for them " the name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost."
As a consequence of the way in which they came so
to believe, it follows that the doctrine at first pre-
sented no intellectual difficulty to their minds : for
in fact mankind experiences no intellectual diffi-
culty in believing anything which comes to it as
experienced fact, though the intellectual analysis of
it may prove it to be as mysterious as possible, and
the explanation of it wholly baffling. So it appears
to be at present with the ultimate elements with
which physics deals, and indeed generally with the
ultimates of every science. 2 The difficulty of ex-
planation and analysis does not carry with it any
difficulty in believing that the facts are so and so.
So it was at last with the Christians, when the need
of explaining themselves became urgent, and their
speculative interest was awakened. They found the
idea of the Trinity most mysterious, and its formu-
lation in words most difficult and always finally

1 See De la Mazeliere, Evolution de Civilisation Indienne, ii 72 :
" De fait la trimurti n'est pas la conception de troia hypostasee,
mais la reconciliation de trois cultes hostiles."

1 This is what Huxley means by protesting that he was not so
foolish as to reject Christianity because it is mysterious. " The
mysteries of the Church are child's play compared with the mysteries
of Nature. The doctrine of the Trinity is not more puzzling than
the necessary antinomies of physical speculation " (see my Bampton
Lectures, lect. ii, note 16, pp. 246-7).

HOW THE BELIEF AROSE 233

somewhat unsatisfactory ; but, before they made
any attempt to understand or to formulate, they
would have said that in their experience of Jesus
and His Spirit the true God had unmistakably
revealed Himself to them and laid hold upon them
in a novel way. So that, as I say, they found
themselves believing in Father and Son and Spirit ;
and the subsequent difficulty they found in ex-
plaining to themselves or to others the mystery
involved in their belief did not disturb their faith
in the fact.

How the belief came about we can easily under-
stand. They came to believe in Jesus as being the
Son of God. And reflecting on what His own words
about Himself implied, and also on what was implied
in His divine sovereignty as Lord of all, they
recognized in Him, as we have seen, one who had
come into the world from the Father and who
belonged to His being, as Son with a Father. Then
again they were led to expect from Jesus, the
Christ, the outpouring of the Spirit of God. And a
few days after He had finally left them, the Holy
Spirit actually came, taking them as it were by
storm, and possessing their souls with an almost
intoxicating force. And the Spirit dealt with them
like a person controlling them, and guiding them,
in the most unmistakable ways. So we see in the
Acts and Epistles how the thought of God was
modified by their experiences, and the Name of
God became to them the threefold Name of the
Father and of the Son, or Lord Jesus Christ, and
of the Holy Ghost. It is very interesting to watch
how the very complex and difficult idea of Trinity
in Unity passes into their experience, and we will
seek to follow the process in some detail. But the
result is manifest prior to any reflection upon the
intellectual problem which it presents. You see
what had happened when St. Paul prays that " the

234 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY

grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God,
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit may be with
you all " ; or when he writes about the " same Spirit "
who pours out the manifold gifts in which the Church
rejoices, and the " same Lord " who presides over its
manifold ministrations, or the " same God " whose
presence is felt in all its various activities ; or when,
enumerating the grounds of Christian unity, he
makes mention of the one Spirit, one Lord, one
God and Father of all l ; or when St. Peter writes
to the Christians of Asia as those who feel upon
them a divine election according to the predes-
tinating choice of God the Father, in sanctification
of the Spirit, unto obedience to Jesus Christ and
purification through His blood 2 ; or when St. Jude
bids Christians to build themselves up in their most
holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keeping them-
selves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of
our Lord Jesus Christ. 3 In all these cases the name
44 God " is reserved for the Father. It was only
slowly that the Son and the Spirit came to be freely
called God, though both St. Paul 4 and St. John do
so call the Lord Jesus. The reason for this reserve
was, no doubt, that the instinct of monotheism was
against such a use, and nothing was more important
than to preserve the monotheistic standing ground
of the Old Testament against the surging Paganism
around. But there is no question that the gracious
activities of the Son and the Spirit among men were,
to their believing minds, properly activities of God.
Thus, whether it be the case, as St. Matthew's Gospel
relates, that our Lord actually named the Threefold
Name to the disciples before His departure, or
whether, as so many critics suggest, it was rather
that the Palestinian editor of the first Gospel was
so familiar with the formula as to attribute it to

1 2 Oor. xiii 13, 1 Cor. xii 4-6, Eph. iv 4-5. * 1 Pet. i 2.

3 Jude 20-21. See above, p. 86.

HOW EXPRESSED IN N. T. 235

our Lord, we understand how inevitable it was that
the Name of God should have come to be so named ;
and when, toward the end of the first century,
Clement of Rome wishes to repeat the solemn
affirmation of the old prophets " as the Lord liveth,"
we understand how natural it was that it should
take the threefold form " as God liveth, and the
Lord Jesus Christ liveth, and the Holy Spirit." l
That is what " the living God " had come to mean.

II

Now we must examine more in detail how the
distinctions in the being of God emerge.

(1) The three distinguishable Persons. That the
Son of God, as He was on earth, was a person
distinguishable from His Father is evident. He
spoke of His own intimate fellowship with the
Father as person with person. We have traced the
steps by which the first disciples were led to the
conviction that this fellowship of Son with Father
was superhuman and belonged to God's being before
the world was that is to His eternal being. 2 We
have seen no reason to doubt that St. Paul occasion-
ally calls the Lord Jesus by the title God, and
St. John evidently does so. This is the new thought
of God that the Father was never without His Son,
or God never without His Image or Word sub-
ordinate to the Father as He who receives to Him
who gives, but belonging to His Being. So far the

1 Clem., ad Cor. Iviii 2. I do not cite 1 John v 8 the text of
the three heavenly witnesses because, of course, it is not authentic.
We may be thankful that Roman Catholic scholars are now allowed
to acknowledge this.

1 Dr. Rashdall says (Jesus Human and Divine, p. 50) that St. John
does not call the pre-existing Word " Son," but surely he does in
John i 18 (if the right reading is " God only begotten," it carries
the same meaning) ; cf. iii 17. Also Jesus asserts that His Self
He who now speaks as man was pre-existent (viii 58, x 36, xvi 28,
xvii 5).

286 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY

New Testament plainly implies a distinction of
persons in the Godhead.

Again the Christ, who is the Son, was to bestow the
Spirit, in whom He Himself lived. In the Synoptists
our Lord very seldom is represented as speaking
about the Spirit. Once He seems to speak of the
Spirit, who dwells in Him and in whose power He
acts, as a person who can be blasphemed, and again
He promises that He shall dwell in His disciples
and inspire them to speak right words. 1 But we
have noticed that the intensity of the belief of the
earliest Church in the Spirit would suggest that our
Lord must have spoken more on this subject than
the Synoptists would suggest, and certainly in the
fourth Gospel there is much more. There certainly
our Lord speaks of the Holy Spirit as of a distinct
person, " another paraclete " or helper, who is to
take His own place. In these last discourses,
though the Greek noun for Spirit is neuter, He is
always referred to by the masculine adjective "He." 2
He is described in decidedly personal language as
guide, interpreter, remembrancer, witness and judge,
convicting the world.

Thus it does not surprise us to find the earliest
Church in Jerusalem and in its further extension
speaking of the Holy Ghost as of a person possessing
the Church. To lie to the Church, as Ananias and
Sapphira did, is to " tempt " the Holy Ghost and
to " lie " to Him, that is to God. He is a person
being "resisted " by the Jews. He gives directions,
speaking in the heart of individuals, to do or not
to do this or that, to go hexe or there. He " carries
off " Philip the Evangelist. He is joined to the
apostles and elders at the Council in Jerusalem in

1 Mark iii 29, xiii 11. But in the Old Testament once at least
the Spirit of God is momentarily distinguished from the Father,
as sending the Righteous Servant, "The Lord God hath sent me
and his Spirit" (Is. xlviii 16).

8 John xiv 26, xv 26, xvi 8.

THE SPIRIT DISTINCT FROM CHRIST 237

giving their decision. He directs the appointment
of particular missionaries and appoints presbyter-
bishops. 1 From time to time the Lord Jesus appears
to Stephen and to St. Paul, or speaks to the latter, 2
but such appearances or messages appear to be
thought of as quite distinguishable from the ordi-
nary guidance given by the Spirit : that is to say,
" the Spirit of Jesus " is not confused with the Lord
Jesus.

So in St. Paul's Epistles the Holy Spirit is spoken
of as a person. He intercedes with groanings for
the Church, as dwelling at its heart, and the Father
recognizes His mind, because He intercedes accept-
ably. He bears witness within the heart of the
Christian to his human spirit. He can be grieved
and disappointed. 3 Constantly in St. Paul He is
spoken of as " the Spirit " or " the Spirit of God "
or " the Spirit of Christ," so as to be plainly distin-
guished from Christ, though in one passage Christ
in His glorified manhood is spoken of by St. Paul as
having become " quickening spirit," 4 and once " the
Lord " and " the Spirit " appear to be identified.
This passage, and the various uses of " spirit " in
the New Testament, are examined elsewhere in some
detail. 5 But for the present I will content myself
with a protest. To say, as " the critics " are so
fond of doing, without more ado, that St. Paul
" identifies " the glorified Christ and the Spirit, on
the strength of one phrase, 6 while in some thirty
passages he distinguishes them, is unreasonable and
as far as can be from the spirit of legitimate criticism.
St. Paul is not a writer who is precise in his use of

See Acts v 3, 4, 9, vii 61, viii 29, 39, xiii 2, xv 28, xvi 7, xx 28.

Acts vii 65, ix 41, xviii 9, xxiii 11.

Rom. viii 16, 26, 27, Eph. iv 30, 1 Thes. v 19.

1 Cor. xv 45.

2 Cor. iii 17. See appended note, p. 253.

And even here, according to the MSS., he also speaks of " the
Spirit of the Lord," thus drawing a distinction.

288 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY

terms. But he is a writer who, without such tech-
nical precision, has a remarkable power of making
his meaning clear on the whole. He uses " spirit "
in a great variety of senses. But on the whole he
leaves no doubt in our mind that he thinks of the
Holy Spirit dwelling in the Church as a self-conscious
and willing agent, distinguishable from the Father
or God and from the glorified Christ. There is " one
God and Father," and " one Lord," and " one
Spirit." That is the total impression.

Thus I think we shall give a true account of the
doctrine of the Bible as a whole about the Holy
Spirit if we say that in the Old Testament the Holy
Spirit of God expresses the activity of God in the
world, and especially His activity in " inspiring " ex-
ceptional men and most conspicuously the prophets ;
and that He is promised as the special endowment
of the future Messiah and of the " servant of
Jehovah," and thereafter as the endowment of all
men in the Messianic kingdom. But in all this there
was very little tendency to speak of the Spirit as a
person distinguishable from God. In the New Testa-
ment, however, this tendency becomes very marked.
The Spirit is still the active energy of God. But
there is a very marked tendency to think of Him,
lodged as He is in the heart of the Church and in the
heart of the individual Christian, as a person a
self-conscious subject distinguishable from God and
from Christ, the Lord or the Son of God, who sends
Him.

On the whole I hold it as unquestionable that the
Church at the end of the Apostolic Age is found
believing, as a result of its experience of Jesus and
His Spirit, in three distinguishable agents : (1) God,
whom they now know as the Father ; (2) Jesus, the
Christ and Lord, whom they believe in as the Son
or Word of the Father, who for their sakes had been
made man, and in that manhood glorified and

THE THREE MUTUALLY INCLUSIVE 239

spiritualized had gone into heaven and had sent
down upon the Church (3) the Holy Spirit, His
own Spirit and the Father's, to be their helper,
strengthener, guide, and intercessor ; and their
thought of the one God includes that of the three
" persons."

(2) Their mutual inclusiveness. But so far we have
given but a very one-sided account of the theology
of the New Testament. It is true that they believe
in one God the Father, and one Lord the Son, and
one Spirit of the Father and the Son, each conceived
of as divine and personally distinct. But this sug-
gests three Gods, and that is not by any means the
total picture. So close a unity is suggested that
each involves the others. This impression is conveyed
quite without the appearance of conscious intention,
but very subtly, both in St. Paul and in St. John.
In St. Paul the Holy Spirit possesses the Church
and its members, so that the Church as a whole and
the body of each member of the Church is His temple
(1 Cor. iii 16, 17, and vi 19). But the presence of the
Holy Spirit, that and nothing else, implies and
carries with it the presence of Christ. He treats the
Spirit dwelling in us, or our having the Spirit, as
equivalent to Christ dwelling in us (Rom. viii 9, 10).
And the Spirit (or Christ) dwelling in us implies or
involves God dwelling in us (1 Cor. iii 16, 17). Each
involves the others. So again it is the Spirit that
binds the body, which Christians are, into one, and
diffuses in it His manifold gifts. Therefore it is the
body of Christ even Christ Himself and He also
is described, not only as the head of the body, but the
all-pervading source of its life and unity (1 Cor.
xii 11-13 and Eph. iv 15-16), and the " fullness of
Christ " into which it grows is also called the " fullness
of God " (Eph. iv 13, iii 19). Though the Three are
spoken of as personally distinct, each by His presence
and actions involves the presence and action of all.

240 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY

The three are one. So in St. John the promised
coming of the Spirit involves Christ's coming : " I
will come unto you." The " other paraclete " is to
be no substitute for His absence but the security for
His presence. And as He abides in the Father, and
the Father in Him, so His coming will be the Father's
coming : " We will come unto you " (St. John xiv
16-23). So in creation and the sustentation of nature,
Christ is the agent through Him are all things, and
in Him all things consist. For that very reason all
things are " through " God as well as from Him and
unto Him (Rom. xi 36). This subtle thought appears
constantly. The three are by no means separate
persons. There is, it seems, in the three but one
being, one mind, one activity.

The common idea of human persons attributes to
them a mutual exclusiveness. They have been de-
scribed as " impermeable." This impression, how-
ever, is largely derived from the separatedness of
human bodies. When we get to the spiritual self of
a man, we find that personality is radically social
and deeply permeable. 1 Nevertheless, the impression
given us of the mutual interpenetration of the divine
Three suggests a unity to which the closest conceivable
fellowship of human persons could not approach.
It would seem as if the Father can do nothing except
through the Son or Word and by the Spirit, and the
Son nothing except from the impulse of the Father
and in the Spirit, and the Spirit nothing except from
the Father and the Son, bringing them with Him in
His action. 2

1 See especially Canon Richmond's Essay on Personality as a
Philosophical Principle (Edwin Arnold, 1900) a very valuable
book which has never received sufficient attention.

* It is to be noted, however, as I have mentioned before, that
barely a word is said in the N.T., as far as I can ascertain, of the
activity of the Spirit in nature or in the conscience of men in general,
or anywhere at all except inside the Church. The gift of the Spirit
is represented as poured out upon Christ and, through Him, upon

THE FORMULATION OF DOCTRINE 241

All this has a more absorbing interest because it
appears so unintentionally. It all emerges in the
process of man's redemption (save so far as cosmic
functions are also ascribed to the Son). 1 But it
would seem as if, in the process of redemption, we
necessarily get some glimpse into the eternal being
of God. This appearance of a trinity in unity
as Father and Son and Spirit co-operate in the work
of redeeming man suggests necessarily what God
is in Himself. The secret of His being is, as it were,
in a measure, overheard. The Church, through its
experience of redemption by Father, Son, and Spirit,
found itself believing in a trinity of divine persons
and (none the less) in the unity of God.

Ill

It was with this equipment of faith that the Church
went out into the world which we have already
described as full of intellectual curiosity and the love
of abstract discussion, as well as full of a deep sense
of spiritual need, which prepared it to welcome any
real or pretended revelation from the unseen world.
It was required to explain its faith to the outside
world, and it found the necessity equally urgent to

His Church. " The Spirit was not yet " till Christ poured it out,
and, except in the channel of the Church, not a word is said suggest-
ing His activity. This silence surely does not mean that the Spirit
is not the " giver of life " wherever life is. And we are surely
right to argue that where the fruits of the Spirit in human goodness
appear, there is the activity of the Spirit. But it is very notable
that, while the Word of God is said to be the Light which lightens
every man, nothing of the sort is suggested about the Spirit. Our
attention is solely directed to His action in the Church so far as the
New Testament is concerned.

1 It is worth noting that we can know nothing (save by very fallible
conjecture or reasoning) about the inner relations of the being of
God except what is reflected in the original experience of the
Church. Thus the ground for belief in the eternal procession of
the Spirit from the Father through the Son lies simply in the fact
that He did so " proceed " when He was poured out upon the
Church.

242 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY

explain itself to itself. And the stimulus to explana-
tion lay chiefly in various suggestions or theories which
might be more or less plausible, but which the Church
felt would undermine its faith and its tradition, or were
contrary to Scripture " Scripture " meaning first the
Old Testament books and then, as the Gospels and
St. Paul's Epistles and the other books of the New
Testament were gradually " canonized," the New
Testament books also.

As has been already explained in connection with
the doctrine of the person of Christ, the Church
teachers made many mistakes. The " prophet "
Hermas in the Roman Church was widely believed
in as a real prophet who received symbolic visions
which really came from God ; and his moral message
was full of edification ; but he had no instinct for
theology, and his utterances, so far as they concern
the doctrine of God, are confused and confusing. 1

So also some of the apologists, in their attempts to
expound the Christian faith in terms of current
philosophy, use expressions which were afterwards
repudiated by the Church, as when they seem to
represent the divine Reason as an eternal quality
in God which became the personal Word or Son only
when proceeding forth from God in the act of crea-
tion. 2 Inasmuch as the individual teachers were
certainly not infallible, mistakes were inevitable.
But St. Paul and St. John, when they look back to
the beginning before the world was, suggest to us
no such idea, but the thought of one who in that
eternity already was the Son and the Word of God,
with God as His offspring, but distinct from Him.

1 He seems to confuse the Holy Spirit with the eternal spiritual
being of our Lord ; and Justin Martyr's teaching about the Holy
Spirit is unsatisfactory, as judged either by Scriptural or later Church
standards (see Dr. Armitage Robinson, The " Apostolic Preaching "
of St. Irenaeus, S.P.C.K.; and Swete, The Holy Spirit in the Ancient
Church, pp. 25-39).

See Dr. Kidd, Hist, oj the Church, i 359-71.

THE DIFFICULTY OF EXPRESSION 243

"He (the Son) is before all things." "In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God." l

On the whole the difficulty proved to be to avoid,
on the one hand, language which suggested Tritheism
i.e. the belief in three Gods rather than one, or
one God who was the source of two others, the Son
and the Spirit, or who was the source of one other
(the Son) and an influence called the Holy Spirit
and, on the other hand, to avoid what came to be
called Sabellianism, or Modalism, which sought to
describe Son and Spirit as only aspects, phases, or
manifestations of the one God and not distinctive
persons. On the whole, the danger \vas greater in
the Ththeistic direction than in the Sabellian, for
the Church was keenly alive at least to the distinctive
being of the Son who w r as incarnate. One difficulty
was that, to start with, there was no word current
in Greek or Latin to express " person." You could,,
of course, describe a human person by calling him
a man, or a spirit by calling him an angel or demon
or God, and you could talk of mind or soul, but for
a person as such whether God, or angel, or man
there was no current word. It was, in fact, the
Christian sense of the value of personality which
disclosed the need of such a word. Origen, in de-
scribing the " tradition " of the Churches derived
from the apostles, which all Christians are bound
to hold, describes it as a belief in the one God, the
Creator of all that is, and the author of the Old
Testament as well as the New, who before all creation
was the Father of Him, the Son, through whom all
things were made, and who in these last days, empty-
ing Himself, was incarnate and was made man, by
a birth of the Virgin and of the Holy Spirit, being
and continuing to be God : and in the Holy Spirit
as associated in honour and dignity with the Father
1 Col. i 17, John i 1.

244 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY

and the Son. 1 This account of tradition manifestly
leaves open questions, especially about the Holy
Spirit, which Origen would have men solve by dili-
gent investigation of the Holy Scriptures. Finally,
however, it was decided that the Three must be
regarded as " of one substance," that is to say, as
belonging to the one eternal being of God, and that
each must be distinguished as eternally a person
' the words chosen to designate " person " that is, the
conscious subject beingtheGreekword,"hypostasis,"
which hitherto had been used in the general sense
of substance, and the Latin word " persona," which,
meaning first the actor's mask, and then his " part "
or the character which he represented, and then the
part which anyone is called to play in life, was already
trembling on the verge of meaning what we mean by
a person. The Fathers are profuse in their apologies
for the inadequacy of these terms. Man has no
celestial language, but God has revealed Himself so
distinctly that we must find the best words we can
to describe and guard the revealed reality. After a
time, of course, as always happens when a new
terminology is adopted, people got used to the terms,
and the apologies are not so much heard. The
Church doctrine is that God subsists as three persons
in one substance or reality. " Deus Pater, Deus
Filius, Deus Spiritus Sanctus. Et tamen non tres
dii : sed unus est Deus." But it was again and
again affirmed that the term " person " is not used
of God in exactly the same sense as it is used of
human persons. The Three are one in a fuller sense
than could be true of three human individuals.

Harnack and others have laid great stress upon
certain differences of a metaphysical kind which
appear to distinguish the way of thinking about the
Trinity which we find in the great Greek teachers
(Origen and, later, the Cappadocians, Basil and the

1 De Princip.f i 4.

ST. AUGUSTINE 245

Gregories) and Latins like Tertullian, from what
we find in Athanasius at Alexandria and Augustine
in the West. The truth is that the former teachers
begin, on the whole, from the thought of the different
persons, and then seek to give intellectual expression
to their unity, while Athanasius and, especially,
Augustine, begin from the unity, and then within the
unity are at pains to be true to the distinctions also.
There is a difference ; and doubtless it would have
become considerable if these Church teachers had
been merely philosophers pursuing abstract truth.
But they had, all of them, behind them the faith
of the Church in the one God the Father, and the
eternal Son who was incarnate in Jesus Christ, and
the Holy Spirit who had inspired and guided in
such and such ways the people of God, and who
could only be described as " persons," and who yet
belonged to the being of the one God. Granted this,
their metaphysical differences, in the extremely rare-
fied air in which a discussion of the eternal being,
whom we know only in part and discern only in a
dim reflection, must necessarily proceed, are not, to
most of us, of much importance, and easily admit of
being exaggerated. 1

Amongst us, however, Dr. Rashdall has been
constantly appealing to the teaching of Augustine
and later of St. Thomas Aquinas as if they did not
really maintain the distinct and eternal personality
of Father, Son, and Spirit, but were content to
believe in one God in whom " Father," " Son," and
" Spirit " are names only for qualities or activities
within the one divine mind and being, which are
not distinguishable persons at all. 2 Now it is quite
true of St. Augustine that, deriving his philosophy
from Neo-Platonism, partly through the medium of

1 See Tixeront, Histoire des dogmes (Lecoffre, Paris) ; vol. ii
gives a very fair account of these differences (pp. 67 ff. and 261 fl).
Rashdall, Jesus, Human and Divine, pp. 24 f., 61 f., 67.
17

246 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY

Victorinus Afer, he is jealous above all things for
the maintenance of the unity of God. And the
human analogy which he loves best as pointing
upwards to the divine being is the analogy of the
distinct functions in the single human person- the
fundamental Self (mind or memory) with its expres-
sion in Thought (or word), and then again in Will
(or love) ; and it is quite true that this analogy of
itself would not. suggest three persons in the God-
head. It is a manner of thinking the issue of which
would be Unitarian, no doubt.

Thus if Dr. Rashdall had said that St. Augustine
(and later St. Thomas) uses an analogy which sug-
gests something much less than three persons, he
would have said no more than the truth. St.
Augustine himself is careful to point this out and
correct the impression. 1 For St. Augustine's faith
and doctrine is as far as possible from resting on this
analogy or on any argument. It rests in the revela-
tion of God contained in Scripture and taught by
the Church. And there is no doubt how St. Augustine
conceives this revelation, and what his doctrine is.
It is familiar to us in the Quicunque vult. It is the
doctrine of one God in three " persons " for we
must use the term person for lack of a better name.
The divine being is one one substance, one mind,
one will. But this divine being exists in three per-
sons, each of whom is whole God, in each of whom
the divine mind and all the divine attributes exist
personally. You may, of course, say that St.
Augustine's doctrine is not intelligible, or you may
say that his favourite analogy 2 does not tend to prove
his doctrine. But there is no sense in appealing to
Augustine as if he did not hold that each of the

1 Epist. clxix. 6.

2 He also uses an analogy which suggests distinction of persons
the analogy of the Lover and the Loved. Then he tries unsuccess-
fully to make " Love '' suggest a third person (De Trin. viii 14).

ST. THOMAS OF AQUINO 247

three persons, of Himself, is whole God, or as if he
would tolerate any kind of " reduced " Trinitarianism. 1
So it is with St. Thomas Aquinas. He, too,
begins from the divine unity. He, too, like Augustine,
derives his philosophy of God partly through Neo-
platonist channels the medium being the unknown
thinker who wrote under the name of Dionysius,
the Athenian disciple of St. Paul, and who was
uncritically taken throughout the middle ages to
be really that apostolic man. Thus, like Augustine,
he seeks to represent to himself the distinctions in
the Godhead after the manner of internal relations
within a single thinking and willing subject. No
doubt this manner of thinking taken by itself would
lead to a Unitarian conception of God. But Thomas,
no more than Augustine, contemplates the possi-
bility of such a conclusion. He knows that the
Christian doctrine of God was not the product of
human reasoning, but of divine revelation. He
knows that human reasonings could never sub-
stantiate the doctrine of the Trinity, though they
may be able to approve it, and cannot disprove it.
He himself receives the doctrine of the Bible and
the Church without a shadow of question. In article
after article of his Summa he asserts, like Augustine,
that the Divine being subsists in three eternal and
co-equal persons. The relationships in God are not
qualities but persons. Godhead is in essence one
and indivisible, but each of the persons in whom it
subsists is a distinct person (alius) from the others. 2

1 " Tantus est solus Pater, vel solus Filius, vel solus Spiritus
Sanctus, quantus est simul Pater et Filius et. Spiritus Sanctus "
(De Trin. vi 9).

2 Summa Theol. pars la, qu. xxxi, art. 2 : " Personal! ter alius
Pater, alius Filius, alius Spiritus Sanctus." ** Cum nomen alius,
masculine acceptum, non nisi distinctionem suppositi in natura
[a distinction of subject in nature] significet, Filius alius a Patre
convenienter dicitur." " Neque tamen dicimus unicum Deum,
quia pluribus Deitas est communis." " Pater est alius a Filio,
sed non aliud. Et e converse dicimus quod sunt unum sed non

248 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY

It requires indeed a philosophical microscope to
distinguish in final outcome the doctrine of the
Cappadocians who begin with the Three from the
doctrine of Augustine and Aquinas who begin from
the One. Both with the like emphasis believe in
the one God in three persons.

But I am not writing in the main for those who
can move freely in the high air of metaphysical
speculation. Probably most of us entertain what
seems to us a well-grounded scepticism as to the
powers of the abstract reason. But we very earnestly
seek to know whether apart from subtle differences
the traditional Christian doctrine of one God as
existing in three persons, Father, Son, and Spirit,
is for us believable. It is to this question that I
must address myself, without raising any question
of ecclesiastical authority.

I think the experience of the disciples must be,
in some sense, repeated in us. I have already called
attention to the fact that the doctrine of the Trinity
is clearly there- implicit certainly, and in great
measure explicit in the New Testament, especially
in St. Paul and in St. John. It emerged simply
in the process of believing in Christ as the Son of
God incarnate and in the realized activity of the
Holy Spirit- the Spirit of God received from the
ascended Christ. I do not think my readers can
question this. To believe in Christ, as the first
Christians came to believe in Him, involves us
necessarily in the thought of God as not a solitary
monad. There in the ultimate being is Father
and Son- God and His Word or self-expression.
There already is the distinction of persons. Perhaps
we should have been disposed to think of the Spirit

unus." Cf. qu. xxx, art. 1 : *' Cum in divinis sint plures res
subsistentes in divina natura, plures quoque personas ibi esse
necesse est." Cf. qu. xxix, art. 4 : " Hoc nomen persona dicitur
ad se, non ad alterum ; quia significat relationem, non per modum
relationis, sed per modum substantiae quae est hypostasis."

THE RELIEF OF THE INTELLECT 249

as only the influence or activity of God in the souls
of men. But we must acknowledge that this will
not account for the language of the New Testament
or the language of Christ, if we believe that He really
uttered the discourses in the Fourth Gospel, which
it is very hard to ascribe to any lower speaker.
Certainly the first Christians felt themselves in their
relations with the Holy Spirit as in contact with a
person, and so spoke of Him. And if we are con-
strained to admit distinctions or mutual relation-
ships in God, it seems absurd to originate a hitherto
unheard-of doctrine of Duality for the originally
Trinitarian belief, when plainly we have no new facts
to go upon. Let us see then whether this doctrine
of the Trinity commends itself to our reason.

I think we shall probably agree with Huxley that
the foundations of things are always mysterious
and the doctrine of the Trinity not more mysterious
than the ultimate principles of physics or biology.
To feel that a belief is rational we must feel- not
that we could demonstrate it a priori but that it
is grounded in experience and that it interprets
experience. It was a true saying of Dr. Hort,
who was certainly one of the greatest men of the
last generation, that the evidence for the truth of
the Christian revelation is shown, not so much in
any light which it receives, as in the light it gives. 1
What commends the doctrine of the Trinity is the
light it throws on some otherwise dark problems.

1. It alone enables us to think of God as in Him-
self " the living God " apart from and independently
of creation. We have seen at an earlier stage of our
argument that the " unassisted " speculative reason
of man arrives, with sufficient assurance, at a belief
in God, who is the " Wisdom and Spirit of the
Universe" that is at what is called the Higher
Pantheism; but that it does not seem to carry us

1 See The Way, the Truth, and the Life (Macmillan), p. 11.

250 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY

with any security to a belief in a God prior to and
independent of the world. God appears to be as
dependent upon the world for self-expression as
the world is on Him. He realizes Himself in the
world. Perhaps He only attains self-consciousness
in the self-consciousness of men. We also saw plainly
enough that from a religious point of view such a
conception falls wholly short of what men what
most men need. The religion of the prophets of
Israel and of our Lord gave a profound stimulus
to human life just because it represented God as a
person, perfect and complete in Himself, having the
characteristics of a person, wisdom, justice and love
in a supreme sense ; having a will and purpose for
men, who were made in His image, but alive in
Himself before ever the world was, the Creator of
all that is and the judge of all rational beings. We
satisfied ourselves that we must accept the message
of the prophets and of our Lord as a genuine self-
disclosure of God. But we find ourselves in-
tellectually paralysed when we try to give any
meaning to this idea of one self-existent being,
alive in Himself with the fullness of life before the
world was. For life, as far as we can see, involves
relationship, and rational or moral life the relationship
of persons. How can we think of an eternal will
without an eternal effect or product of this will, or
of an eternal consciousness without an object of
this consciousness adequate to itself, or of an eternal
love without an eternal object of love ? To say
that God finds Himself first in nature is disastrous
for religion. But how can He live and love alone ?
Now, as we have seen, the idea of the Trinity was
not evolved in response to any such intellectual
questionings. No difficulty appears to have been
felt by the Jews or first disciples in believing in God
who is one only person. But they found them-
selves, in the way we have described, as a consequence

GOD ETERNALLY ALIVE 251

of their experience of Christ and of the Spirit, be-
lieving in a trinity of persons in the one God. A
glimpse into God's eternal life seems thus to have
been given to men. And the relief to the intellect is
great. Now we can see how God can be alive with
the fullest life we can conceive of will and reason
and love because His own being involves in itself
a relationship of persons. In the eternity which
we cannot with our finite intellects conceive He
was productive, and found His object of knowledge
and object of love in His eternal Word or Son and
in the Holy Spirit. As I have said, this apparent
necessity of thought carries us much more completely
to the conviction of some relationship of persons
than to the specific conception of Trinity. Perhaps
it does not surprise us that we do not find our rational
powers go far enough to discover God as He is. We
shall be content to accept God's self-disclosure as it
has been given. But the intellectual relief is great
when we find ourself authorized to think of the very
being of God as a movement of life in which the
Father is eternally expressing Himself and knowing
and being known, loving and being loved, in the
Son and the Spirit. There is at once the fullness of
life in God, for the one eternal being is a fellowship
of persons, one with an intense unity, but alive with
the movement of a perfect life. I could not have
discovered the Trinity. But it is only the dis-
closure of it which enables me to think about God
with any satisfaction as alive and personal in Himself.
2. I am quite able to see that the higher I go up
in the scale of creation the more complex does the
living organism become. The nature of man is
the most complex unity in the world known to us.
If I seek to rise to the source and penetrate to the
ground of all life, and find this source and ground
to be a living God perfect in Himself, the upward
soaring train of thought leads me to postulate that

252 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY

this Eternal Being must be something quite different
from a monotonous unity. When I admit the dis-
closure of Trinity that is multiplicity in unity-
it is only what I should expect in the perfect and
absolute being. And I can dimly conceive how there
in the eternal Word and the Spirit was the counter-
part, under conditions of eternity and perfection,
of all that wealth of life which is gradually evolved
on a lower plane in the process of creation.

3. Again, only when I am a believer in the Trinity
do I seem to lose the sense of bewilderment which
the old thinkers of Greece experienced in bringing
the One, the Unchangeable and the Eternal, into any
relation to a world of which the very being lies in
movement and change. The moving world and the
unchanging, immobile God seemed not merely to
belong to different grades of being, but to be in no
possible relation to one another. Does not creation
involve movement ? Does not God move in the
moving world which He sustains in being, and live
in its life ? But now I am delivered from all this
horrible imagination of a God who is absolute im-
mobility. For God is eternally alive eternally
moving out into self-expression. He has the whole
movement of absolute life within Himself. Thus
to create and to begin to live and act on the lower
plane of gradual and progressive creation is no
unnatural thought to associate with a God who
eternally is life in Himself, because there is in Him
what is dimly descried as the eternal generation of
the Son and the procession of the Spirit. 1

4. Finally, is it not a delight to believe that the
ultimate reality is not monotonous unity, but a
unity which contains in itself a fellowship of persons
one with a unity which can never be realized

1 This idea is developed by Victorinus Afer, whose importance
in his influence on Augustine has not had enough made of it (see
art in Diet, of Ch. Biography).

REASON AND REVELATION 253

among human persons, but which at the same tim
assures us that personality and personal life essentially
involves fellowship ? In man personality emerges
out of fellowship and always involves fellowship.
The idea of personality as primarily individual and
fundamentally selfish we have learnt to be false.
It is only in fellowship we begin to realize ourselves,
and the more widely we expand into fellowship the
more we realize ourselves. And it is with delight
that we see the ground of this law in the Supreme.
For there the eternal being is fellowship. There
is no priority in Him of unity to multiplicity, and
no priority of multiplicity to unity. The Eternal
is one in many and many in one one God, Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost.

" If reason," says Lotze, " is not of itself capable
of finding the highest truth, but on the contrary
stands in need of a revelation, still reason must be
able to understand the revealed truth, at least so
far as to recognize in it the satisfying and convincing
conclusion of those upward soaring trains of thought
which reason itself began, led by its own needs,
but was not able to bring to an end." x

Is not this a good description of how reason stands
towards revelation in this matter of the doctrine of
the Trinity ?

NOTE.

On the New Testament uses of " spirit," and especially on
2 Cor. Hi 17 ; see above, p. 237.

" Spirit'' is used in a variety of connected senses in
the New Testament, not always easily distinguishable :
(1) Of God (John iv 24, " God is Spirit ") to express His
utter freedom from conditions of place or form. As
pure spirit He seeks only spiritual worshippers. (2) Of
created spirits, good and bad. In almost all cases such

1 Lotze, Microcosmus (Eng. trans.), ii 660.

254 DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY

spirits are spoken of as persons, but in one or two places
44 spirit " is used in a sense not unlike ours when we speak
of the spirit of the age (see my St. John's Epistles, pp.
168-9). (3) Of the human spirit, markedly distinguished
from the flesh and from the Spirit of God, see especially
1 Cor. ii 11, 2 Cor. vii 1. (4) Of the whole manhood of
Christ, as spiritualized and glorified in heaven. See John
vi 63, " The things that I have been speaking to you of
my flesh and blood are to be thought of as the flesh
and blood of the ascended Christ, and therefore as spirit
and life, not unprofitable flesh." Burney, I am glad to
see, supports me in this rendering, Aramaic Origin of the
Fourth Gospel, p. 109. So in 1 Cor. xv 45, St. Paul
says, " The last Adam became life-giving spirit " (5)
Of the Holy Spirit of God which dwelt pre-eminently in
our Lord, and after His ascension is given as His own
Spirit no less than His Father's, to the Church.

Now the question is whether St. Paul in 2 Cor. iii 17,
44 The Lord is the Spirit," identifies Christ the Lord in
heaven with the Holy Spirit, contrary, as I have said, to
his constant custom of distinguishing them. I think it
is very difficult to suppose this. And the passage seems
to me to suggest a quite different interpretation. Accord-
ing to the MSS., it runs (ver. 16) : 44 But whensoever
the children of Israel shall turn to the Lord [referring
to Ex. xxxiv 34] the veil is taken away. Now the
Lord is the Spirit : and where the Spirit of the
Lord is, there is liberty." Here the sudden transition
from the Lord who is the Spirit to the Spirit of the
Lord, followed by another transition in the next
verse back again to 44 the Lord the Spirit " seems
to me to be so awkward as to make eminently probable
the minute emendation 1 of the text proposed by Dr.
Hort and Dr. Chase, according to which we should read,
44 Whensoever it shall turn to the Lord, the veil is
taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where
the Spirit is Lord, there is liberty. And we all
. . . reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being trans-
formed ... as from the Lord the Spirit." Here St.

1 An emendation which only involves the change of v into v
Kvpiov into Kvpiov). Dr. Chase, however, prefers

THE MEANING OF 2 COR. m 17 255

Paul no doubt in some sense calls the Spirit the Lord.
But I have come to be convinced that it is in this sense :
" The Lord to whom Israel must turn is the Spirit [i.e.
the Holy Spirit now given to the true Israel in the Chris-
tian Church]. Only where that Spirit is Lord is real
liberty, and it is in the power of this Spirit-Lord that
we Christians are being transformed." It is true that
St. Paul does not elsewhere call the Spirit Lord, but I
think he is led to do so here by the suggestion of the
narrative in Exodus : and it appears to me that there is no
violence or improbability involved in this supposition, viz.
that as St. Paul constantly calls the Father the Lord,
and Jesus Christ the Lord, so once he should have called
the Holy Spirit the Lord for obviously He is Lord in
Christian souls in the same sense as the Father and as
Jesus. This seems to me much more intelligible than
that St. Paul should confuse Christ and the Spirit by
saying " The Lord Jesus is the Spirit " while he else-
where so clearly and constantly distinguishes them. It
is quite intelligible that St. Paul should once call Christ
in His glorified manhood " quickening spirit," as having
become wholly spiritual and the source of life to His
Church, but surely not that he should call Him " the
[Holy] Spirit " with the definite article, contrary to his
constant^ practice.

CHAPTER IX

SIN AND THE FALL

WE are now occupied in considering certain ideas
and doctrines which are involved or implied in the
New Testament doctrine of Christ. And one of
the most obvious of these is the idea and doctrine
of the sinfulness of humanity. For among the most
familiar of the titles of Christ is that of the Redeemer
or the Saviour who " shall save His people from
their sins " and that of the Reconciler, who by
making atonement or propitiation reconciles us
to God, and that of the Second Adam who in-
augurates a new humanity regenerated and renewed
in Him. These titles mean that mankind are in a
state of unnatural bondage to sin or to the power
of evil, and need to have their freedom restored to
them by the act of God ; and that they are alienated
from God and their true good and need to have a
new status of sonship conferred on them by the
grace of God ; and that they belong to a race under
condemnation and need incorporation upon a new
stock. I suppose no one would be disposed to
question that the Bible as a whole views men as
being to start with in this unnatural condition, and
as needing to be saved from it, and as unable to save
themselves. This assumption is stated in a striking
form by St. John when he says that " if we say we
have not sinned, we make God a liar." For, as
Westcott interprets the phrase, " all the communica-
tions of God to men presuppose that the normal

256

THE O. T. VIEW OF MANKIND 257

relations of earth and heaven have been interrupted.
To deny this is not to question God's truth in one
particular point, but to question it altogether."

This is the point then. The Bible is the record
of a Gospel of redemption. It is a proclamation
of good tidings from God. It holds out to man
the highest and most glorious possibilities in Christ
Jesus. But it does so on the assumption that in
humanity as it stands there is something radically
perverted, in view of which it needs for its salvation
something quite different from mere example or
encouragement to make the best of itself it needs
fundamental reconstruction by Him who originally
created it.

I have just said that it will hardly be doubted
that this is the Biblical assumption, but we had
better examine the assumption a little, and especially
we had better examine our Lord's estimate of His
brother men.

This estimate, like everything else in our Lord's
teaching, is given on the Old Testament background.
The Old Testament is full of the picture of mankind
within and without the chosen people as a wicked
world, in which God is profoundly disappointed
and which lies under His just and inevitable wrath.
On this dark background there is the radiant picture
of the righteous who " walk with God " ; but, as
the sense of the individual spiritual life develops,
even the righteous man appears as sinful and con-
fessing his sinfulness. " There is no man that
sinrteth not." x The record of God's dealings with
His saints, Moses, Aaron, and Samuel, is that they
are not only " heard " but also " forgiven " and

i 1 Kings viii 46 ; cf. Eccl. vii 20, Job iv. 17 (R.V. marg.),
xiv 4, xv 14-16.

258 SIN AND THE FALL

" punished." l Isaiah confesses his own sinfulness
as well as his people's. "I am a man of unclean
lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean
lips." 2 The penitent psalmist acknowledges sin
as inherent in his nature even before his birth.
" Behold I was shapen in iniquity and in sin hath
my mother conceived me." 3 This is the tone of
the Old Testament. Thus when John the Baptist
summons Israel to.prepare for the coming of the Christ
it is by a call to repentance a fundamental change
of mind and by a baptism for the remission of
sins, 4 and that is represented as the substance of
the first preaching of Jesus. 5

There is no doubt that our Lord is very far from
representing human nature as He found it as wholly
corrupt. He showed a vivid appreciation of what
we should call natural goodness, which He found
in those whom the Jew r s regarded as outcasts at
least as much as within the chosen people. He
values " the cup of cold water " and every act of
natural kindness. He welcomes men who show a
right disposition of mind as " not far from the
kingdom of God." Also He is extraordinarily
gracious to the outcasts. The " publicans and
harlots " of society are assured of ready forgiveness.
He came, He said, not to call the righteous but
sinners. But there is a tendency to misrepresent
our Lord's graciousness. Two things are specially
noticeable in our Lord's teaching about sin. (1) He
dissociated it wholly from physical and ceremonial
associations and placed its seat firmly and only in
the heart of man. 6 And (2) His main emphasis
is on the sins of " the righteous," that is, of those
who were so regarded and so regarded themselves.
Sins of violence and lust were, of course, regarded
as sins and stamped with reprobation in respectable

1 Ps. xcix 8. 2 Is. vi 5. 3 Ps. li 5.

4 Mark i 4. 5 Mark i 15. 6 Mark vii 20-3.

OUR LORD'S ESTIMATE 259

Jewish society. But Jesus was at pains to bring
to light the even deeper sinfulness of spiritual sins,
such as were quite consistent with social respec-
tability and involved no ceremonial pollution-
hypocrisy or self-righteousness, avarice, pride, con-
tempt, hatred, spiritual blindness and prejudice,
and above all unmercifulness and the neglect of
active goodness. " Inasmuch as ye did it not unto
one of the least of these my brethren . . . depart
from me." Such sins of the spirit He represents
as even more dangerous than disreputable sins.
" The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom
of God before you." 1

When our Lord announced the joy of heaven as
lying more in the reclamation of the lost than in
the righteousness of " the ninety and nine righteous
persons who need no repentance," 2 He was speaking
to the Pharisees and scribes who murmured at His
receiving sinners and eating with them. They are
represented in the character of the elder brother
in the parable of the prodigal son, and of the
righteous Pharisee in the story of the devotions of
the Pharisee and the publican. Thus it is im-
possible to deny an ironical note in this allusion to
"righteousness." It was exactly this righteousness
which He came to expose as " a whited sepulchre."
On the whole it must be acknowledged that while
our Lord infinitely deepened the sense of God's
willingness to forgive, and refused to regard the
outcasts as "hopeless cases," He also deepened and
broadened the sense of sin. He appears to assume
its universality. Thus it is noticeable that, speak-
ing to His new flock in the Sermon on the Mount
and reminding them of the natural goodness of men
in their love of their children, He says : " If ye
then being evil know how to give good gifts," etc.
He compares men to Satan's " goods " held in

1 Matt, xxi 31. * Luke xv 7 ; see verse 2.

260 SIN AND THE FALL

bondage by the " strong man" and waiting for the
stronger to deliver them. 1 He claims of men the
moral equivalent of self-mutilation 2 as the price
to be paid to get rid of sinful inclination ; and
nothing can exceed the simplicity with which He
speaks of hell, with its awful anguish, as the in-
evitable penalty of tolerated sin, whether sins of
omission or of commission. Thus it is quite natural
that, when our Lord has in view the kingdom of God
which He is inaugurating, He should declare that
none can be fit for it without a fundamentally fresh
start. " Verily I say unto you, except ye turn and
become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter
into the kingdom of heaven." 3 And this funda-
mental turning appears to be inseparable from
discipleship to Himself, which means a very thorough
faith in Him as the divinely commissioned Redeemer.
This is apparent in the Synoptists. And it is pro-
foundly expressed in the Gospel of St. John. There
our Lord is represented as holding Himself aloof
from men's first enthusiasm for Him. " Jesus did
not trust himself unto them, for that he knew all
men, and because he needed not that anyone should
bear witness concerning man ; for he himself knew
what was in man." 4 He knew to start with that
sad secret of human untrustworthiness, which in
slow and embittering experience has in countless
cases and in every age turned philanthropists into
cynics and made wise men mad. Therefore He
demands of men a deep reconstruction. " Except
a man be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of
God," " Except a man be born of water and the
Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." 5
Certainly this is the spirit in which the first Church

1 Matt, xii 29, Luke xi 21. This applies not only to the " pos-
sessed," see verses 23-6.

2 Mark ix 43-9, Matt, v 27-30, xviii 8.

3 Matt, xviii 2. * John ii 24. 6 John hi 3, 5.

THE N. T. ESTIMATE OF MAN 261

in Jerusalem understood its message. It was no
announcement to men of a glory which was already
theirs, if only they would open their eyes to discern
their true nature. Enlightenment was not enough.
They needed to embrace by faith a " salvation,"
now first offered them offered in a new " name "
which was the only name of salvation and the gate-
way to this salvation was baptism, which conveyed
to them what they could not otherwise receive, the
forgiveness of their sins, and prepared them for the
new gift of the Spirit. 1 Even the saintly Gentile
soldier Cornelius, though the effective appeal of his
"prayers and alms" to the ear of God is fully recog-
nized, and though God in merciful manner gives
the Holy Spirit to him and his company, is not
thereby dispensed from the entrance into the Church
by baptism. Like everybody else he needs the new
standing ground " in the name," and the forgiveness
of his sins. 2

I do not think the New Testament can be accused
of any pretension to expound the secrets of divine
justice for the satisfaction of our intellect. It does
what is much better. It assures us of the character
of God and thus enables us to feel quite confident
that He will deal in justice and love with every
human soul He has created. But it exists to record
a Gospel a salvation for men, publicly proclaimed,
and divinely covenanted ; and this Gospel is based
on an assumption that what humanity needs is
something other than development or enlighten-
ment. It needs fundamental reconstruction- a
fresh start, a new birth, forgiveness and renewal,
and of all this there is only one source the Prince
of the New Life, the Saviour, the Redeemer Jesus
Christ : and this fresh start is offered, so to speak,
objectively, as membership in the new community,

1 Acts ii 38-40, iii 19-26, viii 14 ff., xix 4-6.

2 Acts x 43, 47.
18

262 SIN AND THE FALL

to those who seek this great deliverance as sinners
who need to be saved.

I do not think I need pursue the enquiry through
the New Testament. Everyone recognizes in St.
Paul the strongest and most vehement maintainer
of the corruption of the " natural " man and his
need of redemption through faith in Jesus Christ.
We will come back to St. Paul directly in connection
with the idea of * the Fall. I would only say in
passing that I think he has been too exclusively
judged from the early chapters of the Romans.
And even in that Epistle he contemplates " Gentiles
who have no law " and yet "do by nature the
things of the law " who " by patience in well-
doing seek for glory and honour and immortality,"
and who find what they seek, whether Jews or
Gentiles : and he speaks of men of old who " had
not sinned after the similitude of Adam's trans-
gression." 1 Elsewhere he bids the Christians look
for and appreciate (apparently in the world at large)
a standard of truth, honour, justice, purity, and
virtue. 2 I do not think St. Paul would have been
blind to goodness of character wherever found, or
would have doubted its acceptableness to God.
He is not a systematic theorizer, blind to what
does not seem to square with his theory. He is
stating a general impression of the Gentile world ;
and if he paints it in lurid colours, he seems to think
that those he writes to will not find the language
too strong. 3 Similar language is used by St. Peter
to Gentile Christians in similar circumstances : and
St. James' estimate of human nature as it is found
among the Jews is not less severe.

1 Rom. ii 7, 10, 14, v 14. 2 Phil, iv 8.

3 The Ephesian Stoic, who about the middle of the first century
wrote " letters " under the assumed name of Heracleitus, speaks
quite as severely of Ephesian society. See my Ephesians, p. 253.

THE MODERN ESTIMATE 263

II

The kind of estimate of human nature which we
find in the New Testament, both in its optimism
and its pessimism that is, its glorious estimate of
what humanity is intended by God to be and is
capable of becoming, and its dark estimate of what
it has in fact, by rebellion against God, made itself
to be was not out of harmony either with the
general sentiment in the period of the Roman
Empire when Christianity first spread, or with
the general sentiment of the middle ages. In both
periods it was natural to men to feel that the world
was a very evil world, that nothing that men could
do for themselves would make it better, and that
they must look for redemption to God and a spiritual
world above. But what characterized the early
Renaissance, and what reasserted itself l in the spirit
of industrialism and in modern movements as a
whole, at least before the Great War, was a sense
of human power the power of man to redeem him-
self by his own initiative, especially by the instrument
of knowledge in general and the science of nature
in particular, which was at his disposal and which
he could manipulate in the cause of his own advance-
ment. This is the gospel of the Kingdom of Man.
And this gospel has seemed beyond question to
I make the language of the Bible sound out of date
| as if it disparaged the " God in man " which is the
I only kind of God congenial to this modern spirit.

It is not that the modern estimate of human
I nature as it is, or as it has actually been found in
| experience hitherto, is higher than the old orthodox
I estimate apart from some mediaeval and Calvinistic
: exaggerations. Rousseau and Byron and Shelley

1 Reasserted itself, I mean, against Lutheranism and Calvinism,
which crossed and half-extinguished the spirit of the Renaissance.

264 SIN AND THE FALL

are as emphatic as the writers in the Bible that
"our life is a false nature 'Tis not in the harmony
of things." And now-a-days we hear no more
of Rousseau's idealizing of natural or primitive
man. He is involved in the same condemnation
with civilized man. All around us to-day a cynically
low estimate of man seems to prevail in ordinary
literature a low estimate of his capacity to restrain
his lusts, or to maintain unselfishness, honesty and
truthfulness in industrial life or in politics or in the
law courts ; and the spirit of idealism is fluctuating
and weak. What seems to be lacking, where the
characteristically modern spirit, in any one of its
many forms, prevails, is the readiness to welcome
the idea of redemption as the gift of God, or the self-
revelation of God which is incidental to redemption.
We seem to want a God who is so fully to be identified
with ourselves that either He must take us as we are,
and not judge us or condemn us for our sins, or else
(in the case of the more enthusiastic and reforming
spirits) that we can find Him sufficiently in our own
enlightenment and our own strivings after progress.

But, after all, we are not in very good spirits about
progress and world -redemption. There are a great
many people, even among agnostics, who are feeling
that there is something in the old language about
the need of a return to God. What is greatly to
be desired in ordinary men is the courageous de-
termination to think for themselves. They have
been led captive by the prophets of the modern
spirit so as to take it for granted that the Bible
religion is antiquated. Now, of course, the
traditional religion had become encrusted with
antiquated ideas in stagnant ages. And an age
which is an age of real and progressive science justly
demands of religion correspondence with science
rightly so called. But when the matter in hand is
the interpretation of human life, which science has

SHAKESPEARE'S ESTIMATE 265

not hitherto shown any profound power to interpret
or to redeem, it is surely not too much to ask people
to reconsider frankly for themselves whether their
own reason warrants them in rejecting the estimate
of human life and its needs which is undoubtedly
Christ's, and the offer of divine redemption which
He makes. And it is certain that the optimism of
Christianity, its glorious appreciation of human capa-
bility and destiny, is bound up with its pessimism
with its profound sense that mankind has set
itself by its own sin on the wrong road and needs
redeeming by God, who alone can redeem it as He
first made it, and can give it the light and stimulus
and direction by which alone it can recover itself
and realize itself afresh. 1

When I hear contemptuous rejections of the
Biblical estimate of man as he is, as if it were dis-
honouring to human dignity, I often think of the
man who of all the characteristic spirits of the
Renaissance had the profoundest genius as an
interpreter of man our own great Shakespeare.
No one ever had deeper interest in humanity or a
higher estimate of man's capacity.

" What a piece of work is a man ! how noble in reason !
how infinite in faculty ! in form and moving how express
and admirable ! in action how like an angel ! in appre-
hension how like a god ! the beauty of the world ! the
paragon of animals ! "

No one moreover ever contemplated humanity
with less of the spirit of the prophet and the reformer.
He was a typical man of the Renaissance. He
stood utterly and marvellously aloof from the keen

1 I find these suggestive words quoted from Dr. Joh. Weiss,
Das Urchristenthum, p. 188 : " Strange as these things have become
to us, we cannot too earnestly make ourselves familiar with the
thought that the old Christianity understood the new life not
merely as a new mode of thought and moral conduct, but as a
wonderful equipment with new powers, the work of God."

266 SIN AND THE FALL

and bitter religious controversies of his time. He
seems to know and care nothing about them. He
would approach mankind, with all his unmatched
genius for understanding and representing it, purely
and simply as the spectator willing to be fascinated
and delighted with humanity as he found it, " good
and bad together." But, so approaching mankind,
one fact about human life appears to arrest him
and absorb him and terrify him the fact that
men are not free, as they would boast themselves
that they are enslaved by passion and obsessed by
delusion. This note becomes conspicuous first per-
haps in the somewhat morbid atmosphere of the
Sonnets in the marvellous 129th Sonnet about lust,
where he exclaims

" The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action."

Then its violence and deceitfulness and its miserable
issue is described with intense realization, and the
sonnet ends :

41 All this the world well knows ; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell."

In the great tragedies this seems to become the
one theme the obsession of men. It may be by
lust, or by vanity, or by ambition, or by jealousy,
or by pride and the contempt of common men ;
it may be by the paralysis of too much thinking;
but in all cases what is presented to us is the same
spectacle of a man obsessed. All the world can
see it except he himself. But he, obsessed, is also
blinded, and so blinded is driven forward by an
inevitable fate to his doom, and only by the violence
of the tragedy can the stage of human life be set
free again for life to go on its way. This spirit of
the tragedies seems to possess Shakespeare. One
of our best recent interpreters of Shakespeare

THE N. T. THEORY 267

Walter Raleigh * speaks as if even that mighty
mind nearly lost its balance in gazing into the awful
gulf. And he seems to have recovered himself in
his last period that of the Romances by refusing
to think any more about it. In one of his last
utterances, in which the man himself seems to speak
through Prospero's lips, he gives up human life as
a riddle without an answer, a dream which has no
eternal significance. Certainly he never shows any
signs of becoming interested in the faith in divine
redemption. But when I hear people reject St.
Paul's estimate of human life as a piece of " morbid
pathology," I think of Shakespeare and what he
seems to have seen in his marvellous mirror.

For myself I make my profession. I have tried
honestly and freely to know myself and to study
human life all around me and in the record of history ;
and I know no interpretation of human life which is
adequate both to the rays of glory which I see there
and the encompassing gloom, except the estimate
of the Bible. Man is made to be a king, but he is
" a discrowned king " : and no one can put him
again on the way of honour except his God who
made him and would redeem him.

Ill

The Christian idea of sin was not developed as
a philosophy by reflection, but appeared as part of
a teaching about God and man which claimed to
be a divine message given that men might know how
to live. Nevertheless it involves a philosophy in
that it places the seat of sin in the will and finds
its essence in disobedience or violation of a law known
to be divine. So the Bible looks out upon a dis-
ordered and miserable world and finds the secret
of the disorder and misery simply in the refusal

1 See his Shakespeare in " English Men of Letters," pp. 210-12.

268 SIN AND THE FALL

of God by men and other free spirits dimly seen in
the background.

So the nature of sin is vividly represented in the
marvellous story of the fall of Adam and Eve, which
dates, we should remember, before any of the
prophets whose writings remain to us. So it is in
the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms. So it is
finally defined at the end of the New Testament
period in the First Epistle of St. John in the phrase
" Sin is lawlessness " the Greek words implying that
the two terms are convertible that there is no sin
which is not the breach of law by a rebel will, and
nothing else in the world which breaks the law of its
being except sin (1 John iii 4). It is this doctrine
which gives its peculiar hopefulness to the Bible, in
spite of its stern view of actual conditions. For
there is nothing as God made it which is not good
and meant to serve a good end. There is no evil
substance. The grossest sins are but the misuse of
faculties good in themselves. And however much
evil habits may have engrained vice into our nature,
let but the will be again replaced in love to God and
obedience to His will and the whole nature can be
recovered. That is the radical meaning of St. Paul's
doctrine of justification by faith ; for faith as he
uses it means the surrender of our being to God in
Christ ; and when that is gained God can work
freely upon us to accept and to renew. " All things
work together for good to them that love God."
Thus the world, if it were converted to God, would
again become a paradise. And at the last issue all evil
wills are to be either converted or subdued, and God
is to come into His own again in His whole creation.

This Biblical idea of sin may be put in contrast
with three other explanations of it which challenged
the Church at its beginning and still challenge it.

(1) In the Hellenistic world in which Christianity
spread, the prevalent tendency was to find the secret

RIVAL THEORIES 269

and source of sin in the flesh or in the material world.
The spark of the divine, which is the soul of man,
is imprisoned at present in the body with its corrupt-
ing passions and influences, and is subjected to the
mysterious tyranny of the material world. What it
must hope for is to be released from the body and
delivered from the material world, and so be free to
resume its place in the pure being of God. And there
were a hundred mysteries and doctrines which offered
to secure to the initiated soul emancipation at last
and passage into the divine. But Christianity stoutly
resisted this tendency to fix the blame of sin in the
wrong place. To believe that matter is evil and the
source of sin whether as the creation of an evil or
inferior God, or as something eternally existing and
intractable is to despair of the world and of our
present life in the body. 1 And the Christian's deter-
mination to plant and promote the kingdom of God
in the world and to consecrate to God every element
in nature, including his own body, depends on the
belief that there is nothing bad in the world but a
bad will, and that man's body as well as his soul,
and the whole material creation, are the subjects of
divine redemption.

2. It is opposed also to the more modern in-
terpretation of sin, which came into fashion with
the dominance of the idea of development, as im-
perfection which is gradually being outgrown. It
is " the tiger and the ape " still surviving in man,
which are gradually being subdued to the spiritual

1 The belief that the material is the evil accounts for the way in
which the Gnostic movements, where this doctrine prevailed, swung
between an extreme asceticism and an extreme license. To believe in
matter as evil begets the desire to be as free from its bondage aa
possible that is the source of oriental asceticism. But after all
we cannot be free from the body. To eat and drink, in whatever
moderation, is as bodily an action as drunkenness. So arises the
idea that all bodily acts belong simply to the temporary envelope
of the soul and are morally indifferent. And hence the rebound
into license.

270 SIN AND THE FALL

or rational purpose. The history of man is the
history of a gradual if slow and interrupted-
progress towards perfection. There is, of course,
an important element of truth in this conception.
Certainly there is a great deal of evil which is ignor-
ance and imperfection, which gradual enlightenment
can cure and which itself affords the stimulus to
progress. If we try to think of a comparatively
sinless world and .what its development might have
been, we should imagine it as gradually outgrowing
its childish ignorance and youthful mistakes- as
gradually gaining control, and passing on to per-
fection in the maturity of its powers. But this is
precisely to leave out the very thing which sin is.
Sin is the refusal of allegiance to God and rebellion
against the law of our true being. It is the selfish-
ness which places our being and its efforts upon a
false centre and so disorders our whole world. And
sin, rightly so defined, shows not the slightest trace
of being outgrown in the process of civilization.
There is sin as much in modern London as in ancient
Britain, though the sin is of a more or less different
kind. Advanced civilization certainly presents a
parody of the divine intention for man as much as
barbarous societies. Progress no doubt represents
the divine purpose, but the reason why progress
has been so broken, so fragmentary, and so liable
to reversals and catastrophes lies just in the thwart-
ing, disturbing, destructive power of sin, from which
neither education nor refinement of itself has the
power to redeem. Perhaps to-day the kind of opti-
mistic delusion that I have been describing is one
into which we are less liable to be betrayed than our
fathers or grandfathers.

3. The Christian doctrine of sin is rooted in the
conception of mankind as really free and responsible,
and has its roots cut by the doctrine of determinism.
According to this latter doctrine, all that has

THE DOCTRINE OF DETERMINISM 271

occurred in general or in detail has been at the
last analysis inevitable. There is strictly nothing
that need not and ought not to have been. The
doctrine is so alien to fundamental human instincts
that while it abounds in the schools of philosophy,
it does not adventure itself much into the ways of
common life. It could not, in fact, really apply
itself to life without moral disaster. To believe
that I am and always have been and always must
be inevitably determined to do what I have done
or shall do, would, beyond all question, as it appears
to me, destroy the springs of moral action. I have
endeavoured, in the previous volume, both strictly
to limit the sphere of human freedom and to main-
tain its reality, 1 and I will not recur to the subject
here. I should like, however, to record a remark
which I twice heard made by the late Master of
Balliol, Dr. Jowett, which seems to me to be true.
He noted that theologians like Augustine, and
(strictly speaking) St. Thomas, and Calvin appeared
to be able to maintain an ultimate and absolute
determination of human actions by God, as a sort
of remote mystery of religion, without its interfering
with the practical moral appeal of Christianity.
But he observed that it would not be so with modern
scientific determinism. That is no remote mystery
hidden in the inaccessible depths of the divine being
and incomprehensible by men. It claims to be a
requirement of science, its action is in the field of
observed experience, and its effect is wholly in-
telligible. It is to make all our sense of responsi-
bility and personal guilt all that is really meant
by the sense of sin an illusion and to establish the
conviction that we cannot help being just what we
are. I am thankful to believe that science is

1 But I will call attention to what seems to me an admirable
article in the Hibbert Journal for July 1922, by Captain H. V.
Knox, entitled Is Determinism rational f

272 SIN AND THE FALL

becoming much more conscious of its limitations
and may retreat from this truly irrational position.

IV

There is one difficulty presented by the Christian
doctrine of sin which, since the principle of evolution
entered into control of our imagination, has appeared
and still appears as most formidable I mean the
doctrine of the Fall. Christianity has not been
content with asserting that men in general or
universally have proved themselves individually
sinners. It has attributed to humanity an organic
unity, by descent from a common origin our first
parents, Adam and Eve and has, in part at least,
accounted for the prevalence of sin by attributing
the disordering of human nature or its partial cor-
ruption to the inherited effects of their fall, as it is
described in Genesis. 1 There is hardly any allusion

1 I am here only dealing with the doctrine of sin incidentally as
involved in the doctrine of Christ's person. Thus (1) I am giving
the go-by to all the questions raised about the exact nature and
effect of the Fall whether positive or negative : and to the Augus-
tinian and Calvinistic exaggerations : and to the Protestant con-
ception of the imputation of Adam's sin to his posterity ; though
I may remark in passing that I do not think any doctrine of imputa-
tion can be legitimately attached to St. Paul except in the sense
that God sees things not as they are but as they are becoming.
This is the real way to see things. Thus faith is imputed as the
righteousness it is not yet, because faith does, in fact, contain
in itself the whole root or principle of righteousness, by retrans-
ferring our nature to the allegiance of God in Christ ; and Christ's
righteousness may be said to be imputed to us, though St. Paul
does not say so, because as His members we are in Him and on the
way to become more and more interpenetrated by Him. Non
quales sumus sed quales futuri sumus Deus nos amat.

(2) I am giving the go-by to many interesting questions con-
nected with the Hebrew story of Paradise and the Fall, and its
influence in later times. In this connection Ezek. xxviii, which
suggests a different idea of paradise from Gen. iii, is very inter-
esting. Also it is interesting that in the later apocalypses it would
appear that that unique fragment of unassimilated mythology,
Gen. vi 1-8, was exercising more influence than Gen. iii. But
I am only concerned here with the idea of the Fall and of its conse-
quences in general outline.

THE STORY IN GENESIS 273

in the other canonical books of the Old Testament to
this primaeval fall, and though it became a subject
of interest in the later Jewish schools and we see
the fruit of this in the books we call " apocryphal,"
yet the ideas there presented are confused and con-
tradictory; and there is nothing about the fall of
Adam in the New Testament except in two
famous passages of St. Paul's Epistles. But these
two famous passages have exercised an enormous
influence on theology, so that a modern Roman
Catholic writer on dogmatics says, hardly with
exaggeration, that " the whole dogmatic system of
the Church revolves upon the two poles of sin and
redemption, the old humanity and the new, Adam
and Christ."

The contradiction between the religious tradition
and the scientific conception as popularly stated
took this form that the Bible taught that mankind
" began at the top " and fell from his high estate
into continually deepening degradation from which
only " the elect " are redeemed by the act of God,
while science teaches that mankind began at the
bottom in a brutish condition, hardly differentiated
from the apes, and has gradually climbed upward
by his own efforts through the period of some half
a million years during which something \vhich can
be identified as our race appears to have been on
the earth. Here is a startling contradiction indeed.
But the statement requires serious revision. It
was only the imagination of theologians in a very
unscientific age, and especially in England the in-
fluence of Milton, which begat the idea of Adam and
Eve as created in the full-blown glory of intellect
and virtue. Genesis does not in any way suggest
it. It suggests for Adam and Eve something like
the complete ignorance, as well as the innocence,
of childhood. All the beginnings of the arts appear
after the fall, and in the line of Cain's descendants.

274 SIN AND THE FALL

And the story of Genesis iii makes almost no im-
pression on the rest of the Old Testament, which
is throughout the story of a divine purpose for man
pursuing its gradual way to its goal, but constantly
thwarted and baffled by human sin. This is the
impression which the early Christian teachers
received. They answered the question whether
man was created perfect in the negative. " He was
not created perfect, but only in a condition to attain
or receive perfection." l So we may restate the
position thus : " The Bible teaches that man was
created free to correspond with a good purpose of
God for him : and his advance towards the realiza-
tion of his heritage of sovereignty in the world might
have been inconceivably more glorious and un-
impeded than it has been but for his constantly
renewed and perpetuated disloyalty to God and
disobedience to the law of his being. It is to this
that his misery is due. And as he was made for
constant dependence upon God, so he cannot hope
to rescue himself out of his bondage, but only to be
rescued by God when he will return to Him in
penitence and surrender." Now I am not aware
that such a revised statement brings us into any
collision w r ith science. We must not speak as if
science could bring human origins into the clear
light. The emergence of the distinctively human
faculties, and the place and the manner of such
emergence, are still involved in impenetrable
obscurity.

But this at least seems to some of us to be certain
and to make a great difference between us and
our grandfathers that we have ceased to be able
to treat the story in Genesis as history at all. We
see there neither a record preserved in human

1 So Clement and, in effect, Irenaeus. The Fathers also knew
that death was a law of the world before man ; and that man was
created mortal by nature.

THE OLD ADAM 275

tradition, nor a revealed history of what happened
at the beginning. We are not disposed to think
that mankind began in a single pair sharply differ-
entiated from the lower animals. We find it very
difficult to form any mental conception of how things
happened " in the beginning." We are inclined
to think that about the beginnings and endings of
the world and of mankind about things which lie
outside the possibility of experience or investiga-
tion by us we can be taught only in parables or
symbols. So we are ready to attach the highest
value to the early chapters of the book of Genesis,
taking the stories they contain as symbols, not
history. We see in them the clearest traces of
divine inspiration. We see there true ideas about
God and His mind about the world and man's
relation jto the world and his relation to God, about
the origin and nature of sin and its consequences,
and about God's dealings with man both in judgment
and mercy all so vividly expressed that a child can
understand them and the imagination of mankind
can never get rid of them.

But, granted all this, we need to ask ourselves
whether the language of St. Paul about the effect
of the sin of Adam in letting loose the forces of death,
and constituting mankind sinful, can still be used by
us ; and whether generally the idea of the Fall and the
antithesis of the Old Adam and the New has still
really for us the equivalent of its old meaning.
I think so in this sense.

1. Sin i.e. disobedience to God and the law of
our being- essentially and always is a fall. In-
directly it may be through sin that we make dis-
| coveries about ourselves and the world. So sin
! may be a condition of progress. But not a necessary
j condition. We could have gained the fruit of the
tree of knowledge without sin, for sin is always a
perversion and a loss. It puts us in a wrong relation

276 SIN AND THE FALL

to ourselves and to our fellows and to God. Every-
where, in all its forms, and in every case sin is law-
lessness and therefore is a fall. We are fallen by
our iniquity. Thus Adam and Eve stand for every
man and woman, and the story of their fall is the
true story of humanity and of what has been its
ruin in every individual case. And over against the
Old Adam, which is sinful humanity, stands the Last
Adam, which is tke sinless humanity. Thus in Jesus
Christ I see humanity both restored to its true basis
and its true relations, and not only restored but per-
fected in God. And I apprehend the true character
of my redemption only when I grasp it as a radical
transference of my fundamental allegiance, and so
of my whole being, from the stock of the Old Adam
to that of the New.

2. I do not think we shall be driven to accept a
merely individual account of sin. I do not think
that more accurate science will make us hesitate to
say with the Psalmist, " In sin hath my mother con-
ceived me." Whatever science ultimately teaches as
to the " monophyletic " or " polyphyletic " origin
of mankind, I think it will continue to authorize us
to regard mankind as constituting one race which
can be dealt with, whether barbarous or civilized,
as having certain fundamentally identical spiritual
capacities that is, intelligence (as distinct from in-
stinct), the moral conscience, and some measure of
moral freedom, capacity in some measure for en-
larging fellowship and progress, and capacity for God.
It appears to me that anthropology and the science
of religions work on the basis of the assumption that
humanity of all periods and in all countries is one
race, and continually tend to justify the assumption.

Further, it seems to me that psychology tends to
emphasize what is the Christian tradition that a
man's soul, or self, is not purely individual. He is an
individual with the responsibilities of an individual,

THE LAST ADAM 277

and progress towards the ideal will deepen and in-
tensify his individuality. But that mysterious and
elusive thing he calls himself carries within it elements
and qualities which are inherited and not personal,
and which make him the representative of something
much wider and much older than his individual self
of his family, his race, nay of humanity as a
whole. In his unconscious mind he carries (so it
appears) instincts and memories which are racial
and not personal. If this is so, it would be very bold
to deny that there may be, or must be, some in-
heritance of sin, in its weakening and perverting
effect upon the spiritual nature, in those roots of
our being which lie below the beginnings of personal
consciousness. 1

In this book I am only concerned to justify a
certain attitude towards man, as fallen and needing
to be redeemed, which appears to be inseparable
from the appeal of Christianity which appears to
have been the attitude of Christ HiiPself. This
appeal takes shape in St. Paul's language which bids
us die to the Old Manhood that we may live in the
New. It treats us as belonging to an old manhood
the Old Adam which is corrupt according to the
deceitful lusts, and would have us regenerated or
grafted upon a new stock the sinless humanity of
the Second Man. It would have us believe that by
natural inheritance our old manhood came to us

1 I think it is important to note that " original sin " is a fault
or defect or disorder in our inherited nature, which admits of more
or less. One man's nature is more disordered to start with than
another's. And the fault or defect can be diminished by self-
restraint or deepened by indulgence. Also, it is important to notice
that there is nothing in the New Testament which justifies our
using the word " guilt " of this inherited taint. No doubt it
disqualifies us as it stands for the fellowship of God ; but nothing
is guilty except the action of a rebellious will. The defect of
nature in itself is an appeal to the divine compassion to redeem us,
not an occasion of His wrath against the individual personally.

19

278 SIN AND THE FALL

more or less weakened and impaired by Adam's sin,
but that it admits of being restored and renewed in
Christ. No doubt St. Paul believed in Adam as a
person and we cannot easily do so. Nevertheless,
I think that there is very little or nothing in St. Paul's
language which will not hold good for us if we take
the Old Adam, not as an historical person, but as
the symbol of our race as it has made itself by sin, to
which by our birth and natural tradition we belong.
And there is no force in the strange argument that if
the First Adam is symbolical, so may be the Second.
We are driven to treat the first as symbolical because
we cannot penetrate the mists of ages. But the
Christ stands in the light of history. We know that
He understands our nature, and we believe He has
the will and the power to redeem it.

In the volume which preceded this I have dealt
with the New Testament accounts of the Birth of
Jesus as from a Virgin and therefore miraculous.
I have there endeavoured to make it plain that
this history was not the product of any theological
demand. It shows in both its forms both in St.
Matthew and St. Luke the signs of a date far
earlier than any such theological or Christological
development as would have made the demand effec-
tive. I have given what seem to me sufficient
reasons for trusting the story ; and I can only refer
my readers back to what was said there. But I have
also pointed out that already in the Fourth Gospel,
where the story in the Synoptists is no doubt assumed
as familiar, Christ's birth of a virgin appears to be
referred to as lying behind and interpreting our new
birth. St. John, that is, here as elsewhere, assumes
what is in substance St. Paul's doctrine of the Second
Adam ; and he suggests that the miraculous con-
ditions of the birth were appropriate or necessary
for the incarnate person who is to be fount of the
new sonship. I cannot but repeat here that what

THE BIRTH OF A VIRGIN 279

St. John suggests and the Church has emphasized
does appear to me to hold good, viz. that any one
who grasps the contrast between the sinless Christ
and the sinful world the world in which the greatest
saints are the most conscious of their sinfulness
and who accepts Christ as the Second Adam, the
new creation in which our manhood is renewed, so
far from finding a difficulty in the Virgin Birth of
Jesus will welcome it as in the highest degree accept-
able and congruous in His case, if not rationally
necessary. 1

1 For all this see Belief in God, pp. 274-82, and Dissertations,
pp. 63 ff. See also in this volume, p. 120, and note 1, for St. John's
reference (in cap. i. 13) to the Virgin Birth as the basis of our
regeneration.

CHAPTER X

THE ATONEMENT

THE idea of atonement made by our Lord for man
in the sacrifice of the cross is so prominent an element
in the faith of the New Testament and of the whole
Christian Church, that it cannot be ignored in any
comprehensive treatment of the faith in His person.
It has found a welcome as wide and deep as possible
in human hearts all down the ages ; but it has also
presented peculiar difficulty to the intellect. What
is attempted in this chapter is simply to fix attention
upon the central idea of the Atonement, as the New
Testament presents it to us upon the background of
the Old, and to rid it of certain misunderstandings
which have been allowed to pervert it. Then I
should wish to leave my readers with the feeling
This, at least, is part of the faith in Christ to which
my heart and my reason respond. 1

Let us seek to clear the air by certain preliminary
considerations.

1. It is plain that the redemption of man through
Jesus Christ, which the New Testament has for its
theme, is a complex process which admits of being
regarded in various aspects or from different angles.

1 It must be remarked that while the Church did in fact define
the doctrine of the person of Christ, it left the doctrine of atonement
quite undefined.

280

THE MEANING OF SUPERSTITION 281

Hence there are marked differences in the points of
view of the different books. But they all agree
among themselves and with the books of the Old
Testament in one point : that ultimately redemption
can mean one thing only the actual restoration of
men into the moral likeness of God. The kingdom
of God, which is the theme alike of the Old Testament
and of the New, is to be a perfected fellowship of man
with God and of man with man ; and there can be
no fellowship of man with God " except they be
agreed " that is, except they be of the same mind
or character ; and there can be no fellowship of
man with man unless they come together in obedience
to God and correspondence with His purposes.

Men are prone to superstition ; and the best
definition of superstition is religion which is non-
moral. And there has been a great deal of super-
stition not only in the religions of the world generally,
but also among the Jews and in Christendom, both
Catholic and Protestant. Wherever men have
attributed some kind of power to racial privilege,
or to orthodox belief, or to sacraments or charms,
or to the prayers of intercessors, which can in any
sort of w r ay be a substitute for actual conversion
of will for ceasing to do evil and learning to do
well; wherever men have proclaimed or believed in
Christ's atonement, or His righteousness " imputed
to us," as if it could be made available for us without
our being personally changed from evil to good
there is superstition ; and the teaching of the prophets
and of Christ is on no point more emphatic than
in condemnation of this sort of superstition. No
expedient or device can exist for bringing us into
the favour of God except by our becoming actually
godlike. " In the rich pharmacopoeia of heaven,
there can exist none such." To be and to remain
unlike God in character must exclude us from the
fellowship of God, however correct our beliefs and

282 THE ATONEMENT

elaborate our ritual acts ; and, conversely, the Bible
as a whole encourages us to believe that there is
no external or accidental barrier, whether in the
way of intellectual error or hereditary ignorance,
which can ultimately exclude from God and His
kingdom any man who is really a man of good will.
Heaven is nothing else but the home of the godlike ;
and hell is nothing else but the state of those who
have made themselves, by their own faults, radically
incompatible with God. There is no substitute for a
good will, and no compensation for a bad one. Thus
whatever place vicarious atonement, made for us
by our Redeemer, may hold in the scheme of the
Bible, we must expect it to conform to this funda-
mental demand for real, personal righteousness.

2. " My song," says the Psalmist, " shall be of
mercy and judgment." Such is the theme of the
Old Testament and of the New God's inevitable
wrath on the hard and impenitent heart, and His
abounding mercy on the repentant. God is for-
giving, as being both willing and able to efface
sins however heinous. " Though your sins be as
scarlet, they shall be white as snow ; and though
they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool."
But only repentance that is the change of heart and
will can change the face of God towards us. " Wash
you, make you clean ; put away the evil of your
doings from before mine eyes ; cease to do evil ;
learn to do well ; seek judgment, relieve the
oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow."
Such is the constant theme of the prophetic message.
And it is the theme of our Lord's teaching also.

We find Him asserting the forgivingness of God
towards the penitent in the most moving language,
both parabolic and simple. It is as expressing the
Father's mind that He came " to seek and save that
which was lost." And we note the stress He lays
on the necessity of a changed heart. That is the

THE IDEA OF REDEMPTION 283

only evidence that a man is really forgiven. So
the unthankful servant in the parable 1 finds that
his acquittal, though it had been formal and valid,
is invalidated by his showing himself still quite
hard-hearted. And on the other hand the woman
that was a sinner proves that she has been forgiven
by the generosity of her devotion to Christ. 2 Where
such love is, forgiveness must have already been
given. Here we have the teaching of the prophets
intensified. God certainly needs no propitiation to
make Him willing to forgive ; and nothing is
needed by the individual to secure his forgiveness
by God but the contrite heart which responds to
His love.

8. All this teaching about God we are surely
meant to apply to the relations of God to all men
individually, in whatever ignorance of God they
may have been nurtured, for it expresses funda-
mental principles of His being. Nevertheless, the
constant assumption of the Bible from Genesis to
Revelation is that men need something besides
true ideas about God. They need an activity of
divine power to rescue them from a hopeless con-
dition into which rebellion against God has plunged
them, and this activity of God is what is called
redemption. The Bible is a history of divine re-
demption, and it is only in the process of redemption
that the disclosure of the real character of God is
made. As has been shown in the previous chapter,
no one can understand the Bible, Old Testament or
New, whose imagination is not filled with this con-
ception of man as needing to be not enlightened
only but redeemed.

And further this method of divine redemption,

though its ultimate aim is universal, proceeds

through the election of one people, Israel, to be the

redeemed people ; and when in the New Testament

1 Matt, xviii 21-35. 2 Luke vii 47.

284 THE ATONEMENT

the Church or people of God is freed from all national
restrictions, nevertheless it is the society, and not
barely the individual, which is both the subject and
the instrument of divine redemption. The method
of divine redemption is corporate. No doubt this
is to trench upon the topic of the Church, with which
we are not concerned in this volume. Nevertheless,
it is in its most general sense hardly open to doubt ;
and it must in some sort be here taken for granted
because the idea of atonement has its roots through-
out in this corporate method of redemption.

4. This is indisputably so in the Old Testament.
God made a covenant with the people of Israel as a
whole, and the covenant was inaugurated and per-
petuated in sacrifice, the sacrifices of bulls and goats,
as being in some sense representatives of the people
or substitutes for the men who offered them. The
sacrificial system expressed their allegiance as a
people to God and His law, and the fear wherewith
they were to fear Him. The customs of sacrifice
date from a time when the people had no under-
standing of the moral character of God, and the
early prophets appear simply to deride them as
worthless. But later, through the teaching of the
unknown prophet of Deuteronomy and the mission
of Ezekiel, the spirit of prophecy and the law of
the sacrifices were conciliated. Thereafter the sacrifi-
cial system is made to express Israel's constant need
of walking with awe before the face of the righteous
God and making constant atonement for its corporate
and individual sins ; not for its high-handed sins of
rebellion and defiance of God, for which the sacrifices
did not avail, 1 but for its sins of carelessness and
ignorance. Of course the consciousness never left
the deeper minds in Israel that " the blood of bulls
and of goats " could not really " take away sin."
Nevertheless, the temple worship nourished in the
1 See Epistles of St. John, pp. 209 ff.

CHRIST'S TEACHING OF ATONEMENT 285

heart of Israel a deep sense of its constant need of
propitiation. There is no question of this. What
is questioned is whether this whole system was not
by Christ ignored and abolished as meaningless
whether in His eyes it pointed on to anything which
He was to fulfil and not to abolish.

5. Our Lord would appear to have said nothing
about the temple sacrifices. He denounces the
Pharisaic tradition as a misuse of authority and a
perversion of religion. But He said not a word
against the sacrificial system. Presumably He ac-
cepted it as a divine institution though imperfect.
But He positively attached Himself to something
in the Old Testament the prophecy of the Righteous
Servant which gave a wholly different idea of
vicarious sacrifice and propitiation on behalf of the
nation. The Righteous Servant in Is. liii is repre-
sented as inaugurating the new Israel of the Restora-
tion by the vicarious sacrifice of himself. 1 He in
his innocence bearing the sins of the people offers
his life as a guilt -offer ing to God. And God accepts
the offering the offering of the one for " the many."
The righteous victim of unrighteousness becomes
the effective intercessor for " the many " ; and they,
for his sake forgiven and by his knowledge and
instruction made righteous, constitute the restored
Israel. He sees in them the travail of his soul and
is satisfied.

This moving picture of vicarious sacrifice appears
to have made strangely little impression upon the
later literature of Israel. But we perhaps have a
reflection of it though it suggests a lower conception
of God in the heroic self-oblation of the Maccabean
martyr to expiate the wrath of God upon his nation.
His six brothers have been martyred in the persecu-
tion of Antiochus, in presence of the tyrant and of
their mother, who stands by and exhorts them to
1 See above, pp. 59 ff.

286 THE ATONEMENT

constancy. Then the youngest, who has seen all
his brothers tortured and killed, makes his brave
profession, before he follows them : " These our
brethren, having endured a short pain that bringeth
everlasting life, have now died under God's covenant ;
but thou, through the judgment of God, shalt receive
in just measure the penalties of thine arrogancy.
But I, as my brethren, give up both body and soul
for the laws of our fathers, calling upon God that
He may speedily become gracious to our nation ;
and that thou amidst trials and plagues mayest con-
fess that He alone is God ; and that in me and my
brethren the wrath of the Almighty may be stayed,
which hath been justly brought upon our whole

race."

Whether we have here a reflection of the thought
of the later Isaiah or no, we cannot, without a quite
arbitrary rejection of well-authenticated texts, doubt
that our Lord identifies Himself with the Righteous
Servant, 2 and this means that He sees Himself as the
inaugurator of the New Israel, and knows that by His
voluntary death, on behalf of the people, He is to
make propitiation for their sins. Both the crucial
texts are, as has been said, stamped with the mark
of their origin by the expression " for many." The
first (Mark x 45, Matt, xx 28) is the phrase " The
Son of man came ... to give his life a ransom for
many." The actual words used only lay stress upon
the price of His life which He must pay to set His
people free. The idea of an offering for sin made to
God lies in the prophecy referred to rather than in the

1 2 Mace, vii 36-8. In 4 Mace, vi 28-9 (an Alexandrian book)
the martyr Eleazer is represented as praying " Be propitious to
thy race, being satisfied by our punishment for them. Make my
blood an expiation (xaddpaiov), and my life (tyvxr)v) a substitute
(avrtyvxov) for theirs." And the author concludes (xvii 22)
that " through the blood of these pious men and their propitiatory
death, the divine providence saved Israel."

2 See above, p. 61, where the point is argued.

THE BLOOD OF THE COVENANT 287

words taken by themselves. 1 The other passage, at
the Last Supper, is much more explicit : " This is my
blood of the covenant, which is shed for many," 2 or
" This cup is the new covenant in my blood." 3 These
phrases suggest unmistakably a reference not only to
the sacrificial death of the Righteous Servant " for
many," but also to the sacrifices of animal victims
which inaugurated the covenant of Sinai, " Behold
the blood of the covenant." 4 This is our Lord's
only reference to the animal sacrifices of the Old
Covenant ; and He declares that the New Covenant
is to be inaugurated also in blood the blood of His
own self-sacrifice, by which the many are to be given
their new standing-ground before God. In winning
this new standing for His people, He, we should
gather, is their vicarious representative. He is acting
for them, without any co-operation on their part.

There is here no contradiction of the teaching, so
often given by our Lord, of the free forgiveness of
sins by the Father wherever He sees a penitent
heart. But it supplements it. God is still to deal
with men, not as isolated individuals, but as a people.
It is the new Israel which is being inaugurated, and

1 The figure of the " ransom," by suggesting the thought of a
bandit or tyrant who held the prisoners, became the basis of the
strange theory, common in early and mediaeval days, of a trans-
action between Christ and the devil, in which the devil, by putting
Christ to death, took more than his " rights " of the Sinless One,
and so had no further claim on men. But we can never rightly
press either a metaphor or a parable beyond the special point of
comparison in this case the greatness of the price needed to set
men free. It was by a similar misuse of a metaphor that
" propitiation " was made to suggest that God's mind towards
man needed to be changed, on which see below, p. 295.

2 Mark xiv 24. St. Matthew adds (xxvi 28) " unto remission
of sins."

3 This is the phrase used in the earliest account of the Last
Supper which St. Paul received "from the Lord," doubtless
through the older apostles.

* Exod. xxiv 8. In other passages of the New Testament the
sacrifice of Christ is regarded as fulfilling the Passover, the Day of
Atonement, and the Sin Offering (see Sanday and Headlam, Romans,
p. 92).

288 THE ATONEMENT

the new Israel must be inaugurated in sacrifice not
now the sacrifice of animal victims of which God had
no need, but the self-sacrifice of the Man, which
knows no limits and goes even to offering His life-
blood. That is the basis of the New Covenant.

6. If we are to trust the Fourth Gospel, we must
believe that John the Baptist had anticipated this
function of the Christ when he called Him " the
Lamb of God which taketh away (removeth by
expiating) the sins of the world." But whether or
no " the critic " can bring himself to trust the Fourth
Gospel at this point, he must acknowledge that the
expiation wrought by the self-sacrificing death of
Christ is taken for granted in the whole of the New
Testament which looks back upon Him. It is taken
for granted in the first Jerusalem Church, as appears
when St. Philip interprets of Jesus the sacrificial
language of Is. liii. It is implied when baptism " in
the name of " Jesus or "by calling on His name "
appears as the condition of the forgiveness of sins ;
for this means that His merit alone avails for re-
mission l ; and this belief pervades the New Testa-
ment. It is in popular estimation specially attri-
buted to St. Paul. But it was already in " the
tradition " as St. Paul received it at his conversion. 2
He places it, no doubt, in a special light, but that
is all. On this special light, however, in which St.
Paul views the doctrine of Atonement we must say
a word.

7. St. Paul, then, especially in the Epistle to the
Galatians, is occupied with the claim of the Judaizers
who would have insisted on the perpetual obligation
upon Christians of the Jewish Law, as represented by
the rite of circumcision. And still in the Epistle to

1 Acts ii 38, viii 16, 32-5, x 43, 46.

8 1 Cor. xv 3, " That which also I received, that Christ died for
our sins according to the scriptures." See Dr. Rashdall, The Idea
of Atonement in Christian Theology ; quoted below, p. 303.

ST. PAUL'S TEACHING 289

the Romans their claim occupies the foreground. As
against such a claim he represents the Jewish Law as
a temporary expedient to convict the Jews of sin
and to prepare them for Christ. This conviction of
sin he presses to the full. The Jews, no less than the
Gentiles, find themselves involved in sin and unable
to endure the tremendous judgment of God. They
need to be saved. They cannot save themselves.
God must save them. And that is what He has done
in Christ. It is a salvation full and perfect that God
has provided for men in Christ, and which the apostles
are sent into the world to proclaim, and it is wholly
the work of God in Christ, an act of divine grace and
good favour which man has not merited, and to the
accomplishment of which he contributes nothing.
On the whole, St. Paul never leaves us in any doubt
that the salvation which is offered us of God's free
bounty is nothing else than real deliverance from the
power of sin into actual goodness or moral freedom,
by the full co-operation of all our powers with the
purpose of God. But in the beginning of the Epistle
to the Romans, which Protestantism has unduly
isolated from the whole of St. Paul, he presses to
the full even to the point of letting it appear
arbitrary the initial stage of the divine "plan
of redemption " that is, the new status the ac-
quittal (" justification ") or forgiveness of sins- won
for us by the " propitiation " of Christ. Wholly
without any regard to our merits or our demerits,
wholly out of the bounty of His free grace, without
any co-operation of ours, God has provided in Him
who is the Head of the New Race, the Second Adam,
Jesus Christ, a " making amends " for all the guilty
past. His unqualified sacrifice of Himself unto
death and the shedding of His blood' is accepted as
something which sets free the love of God to flow
out in the full stream of redemptive bounty. Let a
man, Jew or Gentile, only believe that is, let him

LIBRARY ST

rr\\

290 THE ATONEMENT

surrender himself to God in Christ and accept His
grace, in utter humility and the response of faith to
love and he is acquitted, wholly without regard
to the magnitude and multitude of his sins. He
is given a fresh start, a fresh status in Christ of
which baptism is the instrument to live the new
life of sonship to God and brotherhood in the com-
munity of the redeemed, the Church.

On St. Paul's special teaching about the Atonement
I must make two remarks.

(1) St. Paul least of all men admits of being judged
by single texts. He does not guard himself in argu-
ment. He must be judged on the whole. And so

Judged, there is no possibility of questioning that
St. Paul meant by faith a moral response and not
merely an intellectual acceptance. It is self-sur-
render ; it is the response of will to love ; it is love
inchoate. He explicitly says (within a year of writing
the Epistle to the Romans) that faith which does not
involve love is worthless. 1 He always assumes that
faith involves baptism, and baptism is entrance into
the new life. He never contemplates belief without
discipleship. 2 This becomes overwhelmingly clear in
the epistles of the captivity. But it is clear from the
time when he wrote to the Thessalonians. Only in
his Epistle to the Romans, he is determined to make
men see their own worthlessness apart from God-
that their only hope is in Him and His unmerited
grace and that the salvation won for them was,
in its initial stage, an act done wholly without their
co-operation and for them.

(2) The reason suggested by St. Paul, quite inci-
dentally, why God should have needed such a
44 propitiation " before He could let the proclama-

1 1 Cor. xiii 2 ; cf. Gal. v 6.

a I think Dr. Rashdall, op. cit. p. 116, is justified in saying that
" at bottom the Catholic theory of justification finds more support
in St. Paul, and is far nearer his real thought, than the Protestant
theory in its strict traditional form."

THE TEACHING OF THE WHOLE N.T. 291

tion of His free-flowing grace go forth among man-
kind, is apparently 1 that it was necessary to safe-
guard the reality of the divine righteousness at the
moment when it was showing itself as mercy. This
is secured if the act which is the instrument and
occasion of divine acquittal is an act which placards
before men's eyes the awful price by which their
redemption was bought. But we will return upon
this suggestion. 2

8. It is remarkable that, though St. Paul won
an undisputed victory over the Judaizers, yet his
special arguments in the Galatians and the Romans
about the relation of law to grace, and about justi-
fication by faith, produced little impression upon
the Church as a whole. Part of this argument was
taken up in a perverted form by Marcion ; much
of it again by St. Augustine. But it did not generally
colour the theology of the Church. On the other
hand, the doctrine of atonement won by the self-
sacrifice of Christ, or the shedding of His blood,
is equally present as a central point of faith in almost
all the books of the New Testament, 3 and in the
Church as a whole.

It is the recurrent theme of the First Epistle of
Peter that that which " redeemed " the Church was
a ransom of infinite value " precious blood, as of
a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the
blood of Christ " (1 Pet. i 18, 19)" because Christ
suffered for you " (ii 21) " bare our sins in his

1 Rom. iii 25-6.

1 On special phrases of St. Paul, see appended note B, p. 304.

3 It does not happen to be mentioned in the very brief Epistle
of Jude, nor in the Epistle of St. James, which is purely ethical.
But even here I think Dr. Hort is probably right in translating
St. James v 6 (cf. iv 4) " Ye condemned, ye murdered, the Righteous
One. Is He not become your adversary ? " If so, " the Righteous
One " is probably a reference to Is. liii ; cf. Acts iv 13-14, " Jesus
his servant, the holy and righteous one," whom " ye killed." And
this would probably indicate that the idea of Atonement through
the Righteous Servant's death lay in the background of James's
mind.

292 THE ATONEMENT

body upon the tree " (ii 24) " suffered for sins
once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might
bring us to God " (iii 18).

Again the point of view of the great Alexandrian
teacher who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews is
that of the High Priesthood of Christ. For, pre-
existing as the Son of God, He took our nature,
soul and body, that in our nature, but with more
than human po\\ r er, even in eternal spirit, He might
offer to God the perfect sacrifice for sins, even Him-
self the sacrifice of perfect obedience consummated
in the shedding of His blood and so enter into the
heavenly places to be our High Priest, our effectual
intercessor, and to " cleanse our consciences from
dead works to serve the living God." Here again
the whole status of the Church is made to depend
upon the sacrifice of the cross.

Again in the Apocalypse the same dominant idea
reappears in the new song of the redeemed which
the heavenly beings sing to " the Lamb standing
as it had been slain in the midst of the throne."
" Thou wast slain and didst purchase unto God
with thy blood men of every tribe and tongue and
people and nation, and madest them to be unto our
God a kingdom and priests." Here again it is to
the sacrifice of the cross that the status of Christians
as a body is attributed. And finally in St. John's
Gospel, though very little is said about atonement,
yet Jesus must die for the people of God before He
can save it and enlarge it (xi 51, 52), and in the
First Epistle, "He is the propitiation for our sins,
and not for ours only, but also for the whole world
(1 John ii 2 ; cf. iv 10). It appears to have been
a subject, like the final " coming " of Jesus, which
St. John thought was sufficiently familiar in the
common tradition of the Church, so that he could
lay his emphasis where it was more needed. But
he plainly took it for granted.

THEORIES OF ATONEMENT 293

II

This book is not a treatise on the Atonement,
and it would lengthen it unduly if I were to attempt
to review the history of the doctrine in the Christian
Church. The most learned recent analysis of this
history which we have is Dr. Rashdall's. He is
quite right in calling attention to the extent to
which the moral appeal of the death of Christ is
emphasized by the Fathers and schoolmen, and to
which the aspect of atonement in the work of Christ
is, by some theologians, merged in the general doctrine
of the Incarnation and its effects. But he labours
in vain, as it seems to me, to dislodge from its position
in the Christian tradition the belief which, as we
have seen, is so prominent and indisputable through-
out the New Testament that, prior to all appropria-
tion by men, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit,
of the fruits of the Incarnation, there had been on
the part of Christ, as the Redeemer of men and
the Inaugurator of the New Manhood, a sacrifice
offered to the Father, a sacrifice of obedience unto
the shedding of His blood, in virtue of which God
was enabled freely to justify, or acquit, those who
belong to Him, and to give them a new standing
ground as sons of God and members of Christ.
Everything in the New Testament appears to depend
on this initial sacrifice of atonement, reconciliation,
and propitiation.

I do not, as I have said, propose to follow the
various theories w r hich by Origen and Leo, by Abelard,
by Anselm, by the Calvinists, by Dale and Denney,
by McLeod Campbell and Moberly, have been elabo-
rated to explain the Atonement and account for its
necessity. But in no district of theology is the
contrast so marked between the hesitating and
critical attitude displayed towards these intellectual
20

294 THE ATONEMENT

theories of atonement which individual scholars
have striven to formulate, and the whole-hearted
acceptance of the fact by the great body of the
faithful in all ages. Everywhere where Christianity
has spread animal sacrifices, and indeed everything
which men had been accustomed to call sacrifices,
have ceased, because in becoming Christians men
have learned about the one, full, perfect and sufficient
sacrifice, which renders all others needless and gives
to the idea of sacrifice a new meaning. The popular
appeal made by the Eucharist or Mass in Catholic
Christendom is more than half to be accounted for
by the fact that there, by universal acknowledgment,
is presented to God, as covering all our approach to
Him, the one availing sacrifice. It is a quite modern
hymn which bids us pray :

" And now, O Father ! mindful of the love
That bought us, once for all, on Calvary's tree,
And having with us Him that pleads above,
We here present, we here spread forth to Thee
That only offering perfect in Thine eyes,
The one true, pure, immortal sacrifice/'

It is a modern hymn, but it expresses in language
at once devout and accurate what the heart of the
worshipping Church throughout the world has
believed and welcomed with adoring love : and the
whole purport of the hymn-singing of Protestant
Christendom, and the whole strength of the appeal
of revivalist preaching, has witnessed to the un-
dying power of the doctrine of the Atonement. It
is hard to believe that anything not grounded in
truth could have made such an appeal and received
such a world-wide welcome. We isolate ourselves
from the " general heart of man " if we ignore its
power or deny its necessity. The instinct which
welcomes it has its roots in Hebrew Scriptures,
but it has its roots also in the various theologies

NEEDLESS SCANDALS 295

of almost every non-Christian tradition. The beliefs
may be crude or barbaric, 1 just as the later theories
of atonement in the Christian Church may be morally
or intellectually unsatisfying; but it is almost im-
possible to believe that God is at work in all the
widespread instincts of men without also feeling that
the instinct which has led men to seek in sacrifice
atonement with God is a divine instinct, which
Christianity must have expressed and satisfied if it
was to be what it claims to be the religion for all
mankind.

What I propose to do is to consider the chief
moral and intellectual scandals which have been
found in our time in the doctrine of the Atonement
as commonly preached, to see whether they really
belong to its essence, or to its scriptural presenta-
tion : and then to consider whether we can find such
a rationale of the doctrine as shall make it welcome
to our intellects as well as our hearts.

1. First, then, let us recognize that any pre-
sentations of the doctrine which suggest any difference
of mind or disposition towards men between the
Father and the Son- which represent the Father
as Justice demanding punishment for sin and the
Son as Mercy, pleading with Justice and satisfying
it by offering itself as an innocent victim in place
of the guilty are radically unscriptural. In the
New Testament, quite constantly, the mind of the
Father is declared to be towards men purely good
the mind of love and the cost of the sacrifice is
represented as the Father's no less than the Son's.
" God so loved the world that he gave his only-

1 The story of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia to Artemis, to procure
good sailing for the Greek fleet, is taken as the type of the belief
in sacrifice at its worst, but it is interesting to see how Euripides
(in the Iphigeneia in Aulis] half moralizes the story by making
Iphigeneia offer herself voluntarily for the cause of Greece, and by
making Artemis save her and carry her to Tauris, substituting for
her an animal victim, as in the Bible story.

296 THE ATONEMENT

begotten Son " 1 - " spared not his own Son, but
delivered him up for us all." 2 Wherever we find
the necessity for the sacrificial death to lie, we must
utterly refuse to find it in anything in the Father's
mind making Him unwilling to forgive, or distin-
guishing in any way His mind in the matter from
Christ's. The essential wrath of God over sin is
Christ's as much as the Father's, and the pardoning
mercy the Father's as much as Christ's. It is a
great step to get this fully and utterly recognized.
'It emancipates the Christian doctrine from the most
revolting aspect of propitiatory sacrifice, as it is
found all the world over and in the earlier stages
of the Old Testament. And there is no doubt that
the New Testament excludes it.

2. Secondly, we need to distinguish the ideas of
vicarious sacrifice and vicarious punishment 3 ; and
I think we shall find that "we can repudiate the
second while we welcome the first. We can do this
by appealing to the facts. All that came upon
Christ in the way of suffering came simply from His
life of obedience and sympathy. He never sought
pain, 4 as if to witness pain would please the Father,
or taught men to seek pain, except so far as service
and self-discipline involve it. All that He suffered
came simply out of His obedience to His Father's
mission, and of His speaking the truth and rebuking
sin ; out of His standing stoutly against wickedness
in high places, and out of His boundless sympathy
with men. This constituted His mission. " He
rode out because of the word of truth and meekness
and righteousness." And as the world was, it
brought Him to His death. There is not anything
here which suggests any " punishment " devised

1 John iii 16 ; cf. 1 John iv 10, " Herein is love . . . that . . .
God . . . sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins."

* Rom. viii 32.

8 See Rashdall, op. cit. pp. 98-9, 151.

* Except in the minor form of the voluntary fast in the wilderness.

NO VICARIOUS PUNISHMENT 297

by the Father for the Son. All that is said of the
Father is that He did not interfere to spare His son
that He let sin take its course, and show its real
nature in this supreme example. The Father, in
the divine providence that governs the world, made
our sins and the sins which crucified Christ were
the normal sins of men light upon Him, in exactly
the same sense as all the world over the sins of men
are vicariously borne by their victims the sins of
parents by their children, of children by their parents,
of rulers by their people, and of people by their
pastors. The Father simply sent the Son into the
world, and under the normal action of its moral laws,
and did not interfere.

There was a horrible story of that unhappy boy
Edward VI having a whipping companion attached
to him ; and when the young king did wrong the
child - companion was said to be vicariously, and
doubtless very unwillingly, whipped. And divines
were so misguided as to quote this outrageous instance
of substituted punishment as an illustration of the
Atonement. It fails as an illustration in two ways.
The sacrifice of Christ was voluntary : it was self
sacrifice : and there was no kind of " punishment "
devised for Christ except what was involved in His
doing right in His obedience and His sympathy.

On the other hand there is a punishment for
sinners, and it is of two kinds. There is the eternal
punishment that is, the alienation from God which
sin involves and which has eternal consequences, and
this Christ never bore. There is not the slightest
trace of sin-consciousness in Christ ; nor, as far
as I can see be it spoken with all reverence to
Dr. Moberly any trace of what can be called
vicarious penitence. The Agony in the Garden has
been viewed as if it were a shrinking from the ex-
perience of the Father's w r rath upon the sins of men
with which Christ was to be identified. But this is

298 THE ATONEMENT

simply groundless imagination. Neither the Agony
in the Garden nor the great question upon the Cross
appears to suggest any consciousness on our Lord's
part of being identified with human sin. Purely and
simply they suggest the agony of a righteous soul-
conscious as neither Job nor the Psalmist could be
of perfect innocence finding itself, in a world which
it knows to be God's world, exposed to ignominy,
failure, outrage, and death, while God remains silent
and does nothing. That Christ should have asked
the great question "My God, my God, why didst
thou forsake me ? " and received no answer is, for
all who feel the like trial in whatever degree, a cause
of profoundest thankfulness. But I cannot see any
reason for believing that He experienced in His
spirit the sense of the Father's alienation from the
sinner.

This spiritual and eternal penalty of sin is gone
at once as soon as the sin is gone out of the soul.
And, as far as we can see, Christ not being a sinner
did not bear it. There is another penalty of sin
the temporal punishment which wrongdoing brings
with it, and from this, as far as we can see, Christ
does not deliver us. Our absolution does not
necessarily or usually ward off from us any of the
natural consequences of our repented sins. Only
it gives us the right spirit in which to bear them,
and it turns them into healing penances. To be
i absolved is not to be let off. " Heard, forgiven,
punished " was the record of God's dealings with
His saints under the Old Covenant, and it is the
record of His dealings with us under the New. 1

Thus, as far as I can discern, there is in the case
of Christ nothing which can be called vicarious
punishment, nothing which was inflicted upon Christ
instead of us. The doom on unrepented sin remains
and the healing chastisement for repented sin remains.
1 Ps. xcix 8.

CHRIST FOR US AND IN US 299

Christ's sacrifice purchased for us forgiveness that
is all we are told in the sense that it enabled the
flood of the Father's mercy to flow freely in the
channels of the New Covenant. Why such a sacrifice
should have been needful for such an end to be
attained we shall consider directly.

8. Lastly it has been an abundant source of scandal
that the Atonement " Christ for us," acting in our
stead has been isolated from " Christ in us," re-
newing and recreating our characters. It is notice-
able how, in St. Paul's teaching, faith in Christ,
our atonement, merges itself, even in the Epistle to
the Romans, and much more in his later Epistles,
in the faith which appropriates and lives in His life.
" Christ for us" our sacrifice of reconciliation gives
us our fresh start, but it is but the prelude to
"Christ in us." Our absolution is simply what gives
us our admission into the new life. " I will run the
way of thy commandments, w r hen thou hast set my
heart at liberty." Again and again in the New
Testament the effect of the atoning sacrifice is stated
in terms of actual righteousness, because this is its
only purpose. " How much more shall the blood of
Christ, who through eternal spirit offered himself
without spot to God, cleanse your consciences from
dead works to serve the living God ? ' ' What you were
redeemed from " with the precious blood ... of Christ "
was " your vain manner of life handed down from
your fathers." " Thou wast slain and didst purchase
to God by thy blood men of every tribe, etc.,
and madest them to be unto our God a kingdom and
priests ; and they reign upon the earth." (The con-
secrated life is the end and effect of atonement.)
" His own self bare our sins in his body on the tree,
that we having died unto sins, might live unto right-
eousness." This is the language and purport of the
whole New Testament.

There are, in fact, three relations in which our Lord

300 THE ATONEMENT

stands to us in the New Testament. There is Christ
in front of us, who sets before us the standard of the
new life in whom we see the true meaning of man-
hood. That is to kindle our desire. Then there is
Christ for us our propitiation or atonement
winning for us, at the price of His blood-shedding,
freedom from all the guilt and bondage of the
past, the assurance of free forgiveness and the fresh
start. Then there is Christ in us our new life by
the Spirit, moulding us inwardly into His likeness,
and conforming us to His character. And the three
are one. Each is unintelligible without the others.
The redeeming work of Christ lies in all together.
We may dwell now on one and now on the other,
but we can never really isolate one from the others
without altogether distorting the meaning even of
the one.

Ill

We have been at pains, by reviewing the New Testa-
ment, to understand how central and essential to
the Gospel it announces is the conception of the
Atonement with God won for us by the sacrifice of
Christ. And we have laboured to disencumber the
idea of His Atonement of scandals which have been
suffered needlessly to disfigure it. Now let us con-
template it in its legitimate outline, and see whether
it commends itself to our conscience and our reason.

Christ stands as the Inaugurator of the New Man-
hood, perfect and complete in the midst of our sin-
stained and weakened race. He sets the perfect
standard of human life while He is on earth, so that
none henceforth can doubt what perfect manhood
means, and from the heavenly places to which He
has passed He supplies the power of the Spirit that
men may have wisdom and strength to live the good

THE CENTRAL MEANING 301

life according to His example. But between the
example and the outpouring of the Spirit there stands
intermediate another mode of action on our behalf.
As the New Man, on behalf of all those who shall
give themselves to His allegiance, He offers to the
Father a great act of reparation the sacrifice of
obedience consummated in blood and agony upon the
cross. Over against all our selfishness, our impurity,
our dishonouring of God, He makes that great act
of reparation ; and in virtue of it the Father bestows
upon all those who, by faith and incorporation,
are united to Him a new standing ground in His
presence, and the gift of free forgiveness ever renew-
able, so that their past sins are no longer reckoned
against them, the guilt and the burden of them is
gone, and they can run the way of God's command-
ments unimpeded, seeing He has set their hearts
at liberty.

Even here in this sacrificial action we must not
isolate Christ from His people. To present ourselves
to God, in soul and body, as a free-will offering is our
reasonable service, and it is the law of humanity
that sacrifice is vicarious as well as individual.
We suffer for one another and redeem one another
by suffering. St. Paul dares to speak of " filling up
in his flesh that which is lacking in the sufferings of
Christ for his body's sake, which is the church."
And the New Testament constantly speaks of the
Cross as our example as well as our propitiation.
Nevertheless, as in all that concerns the relation of
Christ to His people, that which in us is dependent
and imitative, in Him is original and creative. His
sacrifice won for His new humanity a boon to which
they contributed nothing, which they must receive
from Him or in His name simply and solely by faith,
the boon of being forgiven ; and over all their im-
perfect strivings and sacrifices that one full perfect
and sufficient sacrifice abides perpetually pleaded

802 THE ATONEMENT

to give adequacy to what is imperfect and expiate
what is sinful.

Christ we believe was one in nature with the
Father. His self-sacrificing love is God's love.
Why then we ask should God have needed this
expiation ? Why should not free forgiveness have
simply been announced as a word of God ? Or, to
put it otherwise, if obedience, under the conditions of
the sinful world, involved death, and all that Christ
gave was obedience even to the point of dying at the
hands of men, why should it have assigned to it this
propitiatory or expiatory value ? So far as we can
find an answer to this question at all, we can find
it perhaps best on this line we can reflect how our
thought of God would have suffered, if the great act
of reparation had not been made by our Representa-
tive, acting on our behalf, doing for us what we could
not do for ourselves. We should have been without
that sense, which nothing has conveyed to the con-
science of men like the sacrifice of the Cross, of the
outrage which sin is upon the majesty of God, as
measured by the price which it cost to redeem us.
The gift of free forgiveness, the freedom of a fresh
start, was not simply given us by God, but bought
for us at a great price. This, I suppose, lies at the
heart of that rather obscure phrase of St. Paul's
which is the only passage in the New Testament
which even suggests the need of an explanation of
the Atonement where he contrasts " the passing
over of sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of
God " with the great act, at the crisis of redemption,
when God " set forth Christ Jesus " upon the great
stage of the world " as a propitiation taking effect in
his bloodshedding, to be made available for us by
faith, for the exhibition of his righteousness at the
present season that he might be just (righteous) and
the justifier (or acquitter) of him that hath faith in
Jesus.' ' Divine righteousness can now show itself

DR. RASHDALL'S " IDEA OF ATONEMENT ' 303

freely as mercy, because man, in Christ Jesus, has on
the great scene of the world made the perfect act of
reparation and borne the uttermost witness to the
sovereignty of God by obedience unto death.

Is there not an immense difference between the
effect upon men's minds of a mere announcement
of free forgiveness and the effect upon them of a
covenant of free forgiveness bought at so tremendous
a price as the death of the Son of God ? The reason
for the fearful price being paid to win forgiveness
seems to be found rightly by St. Paul in the neces-
sity for guarding the revelation of the divine mercy
from all associations of easy-going indulgence or in-
difference to sin. It was guarded by the Sacrifice ;
and it was God Himself who paid the price.

NOTE A
Dr. RashdalVs " Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology"

This is a most learned and instructive work, for which
every student must be grateful. But it seems to me, in
some very important respects, extraordinarily arbitrary.
Thus Dr. Rashdall rightly notes (p. 75 ff.) that the
doctrine of the Atonement wrought by Christ's sacrifice
is not due to St. Paul. " That view is rendered abso-
lutely impossible by a single sentence in one of the
practically undisputed Epistles of St. Paul himself,
' I delivered unto you . , . that which also I received,
how that Christ died for our sins according to the
Scriptures.' The belief that in some sense Christ died
for sin in order that sin might be forgiven and removed
was thus quite certainly part of what St. Paul received.
It was already an article of the Church's traditional
creed when the apostle of the Gentiles was baptized
into it." Cf. also p. 104: "That God had forgiven
sins through Christ, and pre-eminently through His
death, was common ground between himself (St. Paul)
and his opponents. It was part of the common faith
of the Church." But (very arbitrarily, I think) Dr.

304 THE ATONEMENT

Rashdall is disposed to deny that the tradition was
due to our Lord's own teaching. He thinks that the
idea " resulted from the reflection of the Church in the
interval which elapsed between the Crucifixion and
St. Paul's conversion which cannot have been more
than a very few years " (p. 76). It was accepted
" simply and solely on authority " (pp. 80, 82) -the
authority of the Old Testament scripture. " They found
it, as they thought, distinctly foretold that He should
do so (die that sins might be forgiven), in books which
they regarded as in the most literal and plenary sense
inspired writing. In that fact I believe we can discover
the historical origin of the atonement doctrine " (p. 78).
But there is no passage which would have suggested
the doctrine at all obviously except Is. liii ; and that
our Lord identified Himself with the Suffering Servant
of this passage seems to me to be manifest (see above,
p. 61). And the two great words of our Lord about
the sacrificial value of His death, which are referred to
above, both are grounded on this passage. This alone
accounts for the undisputed position of the Atonement
doctrine from the first.

I think that one great omission which is conspicuous in
Dr. Rashdall's conception of Christ is what is involved
in His being the Christ that He came to inaugurate
the new Israel, and that He acts accordingly as the
representative before God of the Church of the believers
in Him which is yet to be which by His death and
resurrection and the coming of the Spirit He is to bring
into effective being, and which is to be the old Church
reformed on a new basis, on the basis of a new covenant
by sacrifice.

NOTE B

Two phrases of St. Paul which have been needlessly
misinterpreted (see p. 291).

(a) 2 Cor. v 21, " Him who knew no sin, he made
to be sin on our behalf." I believe that " sin " here
is the equivalent of " for sin " in Rom. viii 3 (" an
offering for sin," R.V.). In the LXX, following the

TWO PHRASES OF ST. PAUL 305

Hebrew, the same word stands for sin and sin-offering
(dfjiapria, translating chattath). Thus Lev. iv 21, " It
[the bullock] is the sin, i.e. the sin-offering, of the
assembly " ; 24, " It [the goat] is a sin " ; 29, " He shall
lay his hand upon the head of the sin " ; vi 25, " This
is the law of the sin," i.e. sin-offering ; viii 14, " The
bullock is the sin " ; cf. Hosea iv 8, " They feed on the
sin." St. Paul means, I think, simply that " God made
him who knew no sin to be the sin-offering on our
behalf."

(b) Gal. iii 13, " Having become a curse for us."
The argument is Those who struggle in their own
strength under the law end under condemnation or a
curse. There is a better way not of saving ourselves,
but of being saved. Fruitful faith in Jesus can do what
fruitless struggle cannot. He brought us out from
under the curse by His self-sacrifice. He was made a
curse for us, i.e. treated as a malefactor, that we might
not have to be treated as malefactors. We note that
St. Paul is quoting a text of the Old Testament, Deut.
xxi 23, which is " Cursed of God is everyone that
hangeth upon a tree [gibbet]," but he leaves out the
words " of God." It was the world, not God, which
treated Christ as a malefactor.

CHAPTER XI

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

THERE are, no doubt, other ideas and principles
which the doctrine of the Incarnation implies, and
which might fall to be considered here. Thus the
affirmation of the Word made Flesh involves, as
against all the tendencies of Hellenism, the dignity
of matter and of the material world, which indeed
is implied alike in the Christian idea of creation, of
sin, of the Incarnation, of the Church and the
sacraments, of the resurrection of the body and
the redemption of the whole creation. But we will
defer the consideration of this principle until the
sacraments and the resurrection of the body have
been discussed in the next volume. Again, we have
found ourselves close up against the question of
Authority as involved in the idea of a divine
message or revelation, but that again shall be
deferred for discussion in connection with the
Church. Once more we shall probably have been
led already to feel the coherence of the various
elements of the traditional faith which centres in
Christ, and this solidarity of " the articles of the
faith " has over against it in our days a like
solidarity in the sequence of ideas which are grouped
as " Modernism." A certain philosophy appears to
lie behind each sequence of ideas. But again we
shall be able to bring this out more effectively when
the whole cycle of rival ideas has been passed in

306

THE FIRST FAITH OF THE DISCIPLES 807

review. So at this point we will summarize our
argument and draw it to a conclusion.

Starting from the Jewish background, whence the
first disciples started in the company of Jesus the
background of the distinctively Jewish belief in
God and the expectation of the Messiah and his king-
dom l we observed how profoundly Jesus trans-
formed the Jewish expectation, as His contemporaries
held it, even while He accepted the title of Messiah
turning His back on political and nationalist
ideals, and building up, out of the materials of
prophecy, one profoundly unified and spiritual con-
ception of the Christ, manifested, suffering, dying,
rising, glorified, and to come in judgment. And we
noted how, quite apart from any question of names
and titles, by the unexampled spiritual authority
which He wielded, He absorbed the attention, the
faith, the devotion of His disciples, so that He came
to be as God to their souls. This is the feature in
the Gospel story which overwhelms us as we read
it. But contrary to this deepening attraction of
His person, and pulling in the opposite direction,
there was the horror of the impending Cross, and
the overthrow which it involved of all that had been
associated with the Christ and his triumph. 2 We
watched the tragedy of the disciples' failure under
the strain of these contending feelings, and then
their recovery under the experience of the Resurrec-
tion and the Ascension and the effusion of the Spirit.
But still we noted that all their faith centred on
the risen and glorified Lord, the man whom they
had known, full of the Spirit and power, whom they
had deserted, whom they had seen crucified, now
exalted to the throne of God, who had sent thence
upon them the Holy Spirit. It would have seemed as
if they were on their way to deify their human Master
after the Greek manner. But that could not be.

1 Cap. i. Cap. ii.

808 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

In the providence of God it was the bitterest of
their opponents who was to interpret to them the
meaning of their faith. This Saul in the days
when, as he said, he was " thinking with himself
that he ought to do many things contrary to the
name of Jesus of Nazareth," l and was " punishing
his disciples ofttimes in every city and compelling
them to blaspheme " must have known a good
deal about Jesu. Doubtless he learned more after
his conversion, at Damascus and Jerusalem, about
" the tradition " of the Christian society. But he
was certainly convinced that it was nothing less
than the action of God in his own soul that had
" revealed his Son " in him ; and this the Divine
Sonship- becomes the keynote of his teaching about
Jesus. The man born of the seed of David
according to the flesh, who after living and dying
as man had been exalted to the divine glory and
to the supreme Lordship before He was born of a
woman to His human condition, aye, before ever
the world was, was the proper Son of God, a Son
with His Father, through whom all things were
made and in whom all things have their consistency.
This is the doctrine of the Incarnation. And we
noted that this doctrine, which interprets the person
and glory of the ascended Jesus upon the background
of Jewish monotheism as the coming of God's
own Son in the flesh, and not the deification of a
man, seems to have been without controversy
accepted throughout the churches. 2 There is, as
we saw, no Adoptionism, properly so called, to be
found in the New Testament. And we discovered
in the Synoptic records of Jesus several solemn
sayings which are most certainly original and which
can only be interpreted in the sense of a trans-
cendental, superhuman Sonship. They do not differ
in real implication from the more emphatic utter-
1 Acts xxvi. 9. 2 Cap. iii.

THE DOCTRINE OF INCARNATION 309

ances about pre-existent Sonship ascribed to Jesus
in the Fourth Gospel. That Jesus so spoke must
have been on record in the tradition of the Church,
though the force of His words had not been generally
realized till St. Paul brought it home to the other
apostles in its full force. So only can we account
for his doctrine of Incarnation coming so easily into
general acceptance.

We analyzed the substantially identical doctrine of
the Incarnation of the Son or " Word " of God in
St. Paul, in the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews,
and in St. John. Besides the words of Jesus Himself,
we found the materials for the conception of these
first expositors of the person of our Lord in the
Jewish phrases " the Word," and " the Wisdom,"
and "the Abiding Place " of God phrases expressive
of God as He manifests Himself in nature or amongst
His people much more obviously than in any
purely Hellenistic sources. But it is to be re-
membered that Hellenism had already influenced
the Jewish tradition, especially at Alexandria, as
in the Book of Wisdom; and the Epistle to the
Hebrews at least is an Alexandrian book. 1

If the Hellenistic influence on Christian origins
has been much exaggerated by one school of critics,
so by another school of critics has the influence of
the later Jewish Apocalypses. This was our con-
clusion when we examined the eschatological and
apocalyptic teaching of Jesus and noted its complex
character and originality. That our Lord was an
apocalyptic seer there is no doubt, but He profoundly
transmuted the apocalyptic tradition in adopting
it. On the whole, He approximates far more closely
in teaching to the prophets than to the later writers
of Apocalypses. In particular, we saw no good
reason for supposing that He prophesied the im-
mediate coming of the end of the world. On the

21 i Cap. iv.

310 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

contrary, He appears to have declared explicitly
that He had no map of the future spread before
His eyes. 1

Having thus reviewed the thought of the New
Testament about Christ, we contrasted its doctrine,
which is the traditional doctrine, about His person
with the most striking and distinctive modern views,
all of a humanitarian and rationalistic type, which
have claimed the name of critical reconstructions,
and found them not truly critical, in that they are
strangely arbitrary in what they accept and what
they reject, and even violently contrary in their
results. We saw reason to claim that the traditional
faith modified, in view of really critical require-
ments, but substantially unchanged is alone able
to account for the facts as a whole, the facts of the
Gospel story and the convictions of the first disciples,
by which alone the origin of the Christian Church
can be explained. And we considered the most
important types of objection w r hich are made to the
traditional doctrine. 2

Then we studied the later development of the
doctrine of Christ's person in outline, and came to
the conclusion that the decisions of the Councils,
which fixed the doctrine in dogmatic limits, were
all of them necessary and justified in their negative
aspects, considered as excluding types of teaching
fundamentally destructive of the Christian faith ;
but that they were open to great abuse when they
were made the positive basis on which a picture of
a Christ was erected, in some points strangely unlike
the picture in the Gospels. We felt the need of
insisting that, while the decrees were necessary as
hedges or safeguards of the fundamental faith of
the New Testament, they should be understood to
direct us to the Christ of the Gospels as giving us
the positive image, and to the apostolic writers
1 Cap. v. * Cap. vi.

OTHER DOCTRINES INVOLVED 311

as giving us the positive interpretation, of His
person. 1

Then we proceeded to consider the main ideas
and doctrines which the Incarnation doctrine of
the New Testament is found to involve ; and first
the doctrine of the trinity of " persons " in the
unity of God, the sense of which gradually became
distinct in the process of experience which the Gospels
record, by which the Name of God became to the
disciples the Name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Ghost ; and we took note of the
profound assistance which the reason finds in this
conception of the one divine being as not a
monotonous unit, but containing within Himself
relationships which human language at least can
only describe as a fellowship of persons. 2

Next we examined the presupposition of all the
Biblical accounts of Redemption, viz. that man is
universally sinful and that, in order to realize the
end of his being in fellowship with God and fellow-
ship amongst men, he needs something much more
than enlightenment. He needs such a fundamental
recreation and renewal as involves the direct action
of the God who made him. He must be saved.
He cannot save himself. And we examined in
outline the meaning of the doctrine of " original
(or racial) sin," and found it justified or rather
required by the essentially corporate and racial
basis of human personality. 3

Finally we found the idea of Atonement or Pro-
pitiation made by Christ before God, on behalf of
the New Humanity which He came to inaugurate,
to be an idea which the writers of the New Testament
and the Church from the beginning assumed for
true. We found that it clearly depends upon Christ's
own testimony. We endeavoured to rid it of scandals
in which, in the current tradition of the Church,

1 Cap. vii. * Cap. viii. 8 Cap. ix.

312 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

it has become too plentifully involved ; and thus
purged, and presented in its original outline, we
found it free from the moral objections which have
been urged against it, and deeply responsive to the
moral reason, which demands reparation to evoke
and justify forgiveness ; and we saw that its in-
tellectual justification is inseparable from that
estimate of Christ's person which sees in Him the
representative head of a new humanity, who can
act for His " members." l

II

In all this process of observing and thinking we
have found no justification for certain opinions
which are commonly held and propounded as critical,
viz. (1) that the theology of St. Paul and St. John,
which is with little difference the theology of the
Catholic Church, overlays and obscures the naive
theology, if so it is to be called, of the historical
Jesus. In any case you cannot get behind the
apostolic witness. The Epistles are, as a whole,
somewhat older than the Gospels as we have them,
and the earliest Gospel records grew up in the heart
of the Church which the Acts and the Epistles dis-
close to us. But also in these earliest records we
discern a person who cannot be reduced to merely
human proportions. The picture of Him, which
we feel compelled to take for history and not for
invention, is the picture of the superhuman Son of
God. It justifies and requires the theology of St. Paul
and St. John.

(2) We have seen no justification for asserting
any determining influence of Hellenistic ideas upon
the origins of Christianity, upon the Christianity
of the New Testament. It is true that it had a
much greater and deeper influence upon its develop-
ment, which we shall have to consider in connection

1 Cap. x.

CURRENT MISTAKES 313

with the sacramental system of the Church. But
it had little influence on its origins, save in so far as
it had already influenced Alexandrian Judaism in
such a way as the Book of Wisdom represents. Like
Christianity, so Judaism showed a marked power
at different periods to assimilate foreign elements
from Babylonia and Persia and Greece and to in-
corporate them into its own proper tradition in a
discriminating spirit which never suffered the
essential character of its own doctrine to be impaired
or obscured. These elements had come to belong
to Judaism before Christ was born. They belong
to His background. But they were not consider-
able. It is substantially only the religion of the
prophets and the person and teaching of Jesus
which provide the materials of New Testament
Christianity.

(3) Nor have we found justification for the ex-
aggerated importance which a good many distin-
guished teachers ascribe to the Jewish apocalypses,
and especially to the Similitudes of the Book of
Enoch. We found no trace in the New Testament
of the idea of the Pre-existing Son of Man, who is
neither properly divine nor properly human. I sup-
pose no one believes that such a being ever really
existed. He is purely mythical ; and it is astonish-
ing how large an influence even some orthodox
theologians seem to allow to this mythical figure,
without recognizing that the superstructure of ortho-
dox theology is immensely weakened if myth enters
so largely into its foundations. But in fact the
conception does not really appear in the New Testa-
ment. It is gratuitous to imagine it. 1

1 The only sentence which really at first sight suggests it is
John v 27, " He gave him authority to execute judgment, because
he is the Son of Man." This sounds like the Similitudes of Enoch.
But it is impossible to ascribe the idea, of a pre-existing Son of Man
to John. He explains his theology in his preface, and it appears
constantly in his Gospel, and there is no room for it. It is the
Word or Son of God who pre exists.

814 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

III

Not indeed in New Testament times, but in the
succeeding ages of the Church, especially when intel-
lectual life has been keen, the doctrine of the person
of Christ has been the centre of bitter controversy,
and this controversy has undoubtedly distracted the
attention of the Church from what ought always
to be its main interest the following " the way,"
the living the life, the maintenance of the moral, social
witness. The religion of Christ, as He taught it,
was to be, first of all, the way. The way was a
hard way, and made a tremendous claim for sacrifice
upon the heart and will of men. But for the men
of good will it does not appear that our Lord intended
the doctrinal claim to prove difficult. "If any man
willeth to do God's will, he shall know of the teaching,
whether it be of God." 1 But the gravest scandal
which Church history presents to many of the best
men is that again and again in East and West,
among Catholics and Protestants, they see a rigid,
controversial, and often merciless insistence on
doctrinal orthodoxy, coupled with manifest laxity of
moral discipline. The situation in the Church has
thus constantly presented features precisely contra-
dictory to the apparent intention of Christ that
is to say, a concentration of interest on precise
orthodoxy, coupled with a great readiness to " make
it easy" in moral matters for those who are prepared
to submit to the doctrinal authority of the Church,
and to conform to its required practice. This, I
cannot doubt, is the gravest of all the causes of
scandal in the Church, and I cannot minimize it
or apologize for it. 2

1 John vii 17.

8 I would venture to refer to my " Essex Hall Lecture,"
Christianity applied to the Life of Men and Nations, given by me in
1920, and published by the Lindsey Press, 5 Essex Street, Strand,
London, W.C.

THEOLOGY DISPARAGED 315

But when, in order to remove this scandal, men
disparage theology they make a fundamental mis-
take. However many inconsistencies may be found
in all ages between men's lives and their professed
beliefs, there can be no question that, in the long
run, how men behave will depend upon what they
really believe about God and human nature and
destiny ; and in particular that the Christian " way "
depends for its motives and supports upon a specific
doctrine about God and His love and His purposes
for man, that is the doctrine of the Incarnation.
" Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that
he loved us, and sent his Son." No one who has
followed with any degree of sympathy the argument
of this book will doubt that St. Paul and St. John
were right in perceiving that the Gospel requires
theological controversy, where necessary to defend
a certain original and final doctrine on which it
depends. " Though we, or an angel from heaven,
should preach unto you any gospel other than that
which we preached unto you, let him be anathema."
" Whosoever goeth onward and abideth not in the
teaching of Christ, hath not God." x My last words
in this volume shall be an attempt to set in a clear
light the importance of maintaining (though never
by methods of force) the doctrine about Christ of
St. Paul and St. John.

I think the word which best sums up the importance
of this Incarnation doctrine is finality or uniqueness.
Let me quote the thoughtful language of Edwyn
Be van 2 :

" The great dividing line, it appears to me, is that
which marks off all those who hold that the relation of
Jesus to God however they describe or formulate it
is of such a kind that it could not be repeated in any
other individual that to speak, in fact, of its being
repeated in any other individual is a contradiction in

1 Gal. i 8-9, 2 John 9. 2 Hellenism and Christianity, p. 271.

316 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

terms, since any individual standing in that relation to
God would be Jesus, and that Jesus, in virtue of this
relation, has the same absolute claim upon all men's
worship and loyalty as belongs to God. A persuasion
of this sort of uniqueness attaching to Jesus seems to
me the essential characteristic of what has actually in
the field of human history been Christianity."

Now it is to me evident that nothing but the
doctrine of "tliQ.Word made flesh" the doctrine of
the Nicene Creed can interpret or justify this unique-
ness and finality ascribed to Christ. Dr. Kirsopp
Lake has set before us the opposite estimate of the
teaching of Jesus in human history, as contributory
but as essentially neither final nor complete. 1 Dr.
Lake is regarded as an " extremist." But my
contention is, that no " mediating " doctrine, nothing
except the full doctrine of the Nicene Creed, which is
substantially identical with St. Paul's and St. John's,
can either explain or justify the ascription to Jesus
of finality and uniqueness in the strict sense. What
I mean is this : if that doctrine is true, there is
finality. No disclosure of God to man, such as is
possible in this world, can be even conceived fuller
or completer than is given in Him who is God in-
carnate the Word made flesh. He that hath seen
Him hath seen the Father. And no relation of man
to God can be even conceived closer than in Him
in whom the Manhood is taken into God. From
Him, so conceived, proceeds necessarily the final
and universal religion, for whatever elements of
truth are found in the religions of the world, and
whatever excellencies in moral ideal, here, in Christ,
is necessarily something more complete. And \ve
cannot " look for another " Christ. There can be
no other. That person, Jesus of Nazareth, is on
the throne of the universe.

1 See the conclusion of his Landmarks in the History of Early
Christianity.

THE FINALITY OF CHRIST 317

On the other hand, no doctrine of Christ, less than
this, can justify the claim of finality. If Jesus was
a man who began His existence as a person when
He was born of Mary however close the union with
God into which He was taken, however full the
inspiration of the Spirit granted to Him there can
be no reason in the nature of things why another
man, in a later age or in another country, and be-
longing to another tradition, should not be in the
same relation to God and equally or more fully
inspired. No form of adoptionist or Nestorian or
generally humanitarian teaching can claim finality
for its Christ.

It must be remembered that religion is a thing
for common men. The refinements of the Antiochene
school which lay behind Nestorianism were very
subtle ; but Nestorianism as vulgarly understood
was their inevitable outcome. Common men can
understand the doctrine of the Incarnation, and
they can understand the doctrine of an inspired
man. But I do not think it is open to question that
so far as they came to hold the latter doctrine,
though they might accept Christ as the best and
most fully inspired man who has hitherto appeared
among men, they would neither worship Him nor
think Him the final revelation, nor His name the
one name, nor His religion the religion for all man-
kind. I cannot conceive how this can be doubted.

Of course there are those who would say that
the acceptance of the category of evolution in all
departments of life, and in the regions of human
religion and morality, renders the very idea of
a final religion revealed two thousand years ago,
and never to be antiquated, quite unacceptable.
But I suppose that this objection is based upon a
misconception about evolution which we are out-
growing. Evolution is as compatible with retro-
gression as with progress, as we were warned by

318 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

Huxley long ago. It must accommodate itself to
the facts. The facts of human history suggest
nothing less than necessary or uniform progress.
In the particular region of the history of religion
this is especially the case. The highest level in the
religion of Persia was attained in the teaching of
Zoroaster, three thousand years ago. The highest
level in Buddhism is indisputably the level of
Siddartha Gotama. It would remain true, even if
Christ were a mere man, that though in that case,
no doubt, some successor might attain a higher level
than He, yet in fact He still remained the highest
ideal. And these considerations suffice, I think,
to prevent our rejecting the idea of the incarna-
tion of God in Christ, once for all, as if it could be
repudiated in the name of evolution.

But there is another consideration perhaps more
satisfactory. It is that though Christ is final
though He is on the throne of the world and His
judgment the final judgment though St. John can
rightly claim of Christians that any " advance "
which takes a Christian teacher outside or away from
the " doctrine of Christ " is self-condemned yet
that Christ and the doctrine of Christ is so rich and
manifold that it will take all races and all ages and
all sorts of individual characters to realize all that it
involves. That is an idea suggested to us by both
St. Paul and St. John. By St. Paul when he bids us
see the whole development of the Church catholic
as the sphere in which Christ is to be gradually ful-
filled : by St. John when he recalls to us that the
function of the Spirit is to lead the Church into " all
the truth." No doubt this is an often misinterpreted
text. It needs to be coupled with the two neigh-
bouring texts where our Lord speaks to the disciples
of the Holy Spirit as " to bring all things to your
remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you "
and " to glorify me : for he shall take of mine and

THE ASCENSION 319

shall declare it unto you." The function of the Spirit
is to interpret Christ and not to supersede Him.
Nevertheless there is so much to be brought out and
interpreted that we are constantly feeling we have
only made a beginning of understanding Him, and
that as Jew and Greek and Roman and French-
man and Englishman and German have contributed,
so will Indian and Chinese and Japanese. It will
take all mankind to understand Him in whom dwells
all the fulness of God bodily.

The ascension of Jesus is the symbol of His
finality. He passed to the throne of the world. He
is to come to judge the quick and dead. His judg-
ment on all men and things is to be the final judgment.
But the Ascension, though it is in this sense the great
end and there can be no higher summit, yet in
another most manifest sense is a fresh beginning.
It is but the establishment upon His secure throne
of Him who is to be the source of redemption for all
men : who by His Spirit is to work throughout the
world of men until all men have heard His Gospel in
effective power and the kingdoms of the world can
become the kingdoms of God and of His Christ.

So understood Christianity is indeed the religion
of development or unfolding the gradual unfolding
of all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge which
are in Christ.

NOTE ON THE ASCENSION.

There is an idea current that the articles of the Creed,
"He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right
hand of God ; from thence He shall come to judge the
quick and the dead " depended upon the old Ptolemaic
astronomy which rendered possible a belief in a heaven
above our heads ; and that the disappearance of this
theory has invalidated this group of beliefs connected

320 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

with the Ascension. The same is said to be true of the
belief in the descent into hell. Thus Dr. Glazebrook
says : " The clauses have no literal meaning except for
those who regard the earth as a fixed centre of creation,
with a hollow space underneath for Hades and a solid
vault overhead." And Dr. Streeter, " The Ascension
implies the belief that heaven is a definite region locally
fixed above the solid bowl of the skies."

But it is a mistake to suppose that all intelligent
Christians of the early ages held such ideas. Plato had
taught the intelligent world of the Greco-Roman Empire
by his myths to accept the principle that about
41 the other world " or other worlds we can be taught
for the most part only in figure or allegory. This idea
was widely diffused and Alexandrian Judaism gave it
additional vogue. There is no doubt that ideas about
heaven and hell such as Dr. Glazebrook and Dr. Streeter
refer to did prevail in the world of the first centuries,
outside the Church and inside it. But it is not the case
that they were universal. I doubt whether St. Paul held
any such ideas. When he speaks of Christians being
now with Christ " in the heavenlies " or heavenly
sphere, 1 he cannot have been thinking of it as a defined
locality. When he speaks of " being caught up into the
third heaven " I suspect he knew quite well that he was
speaking in a figure, as one who sees but a blurred re-
flection in a mirror, or apprehends but in a riddle. 2 Nor
is it the least probable that when the author of the
Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of our Lord as having
passed through the heavens into the true tabernacle 3
he was forgetting what he had learned from his Alex-
andrian teachers, that earthly things are only " figures "
or " shadows " of eternal realities. 4 No one would be
disposed to ascribe materialistic ideas of heaven to
Clement and Origen. But it is more surprising to find
Jerome, when he is interpreting " foolish speaking "
(on Eph. iii 5), 5 giving it as an example of such nonsense
that Christians dare to say " that heaven is curved like

1 Eph. i 3, ii 6. 2 1 Cor. xiii 12.

8 iv 14, viii 2. 4 ix 23, x 1.

8 P.L. xxvi 519 f. Dr. Harris, Creeds or no Creeds, called my
attention to this quotation.

THE ASCENSION 321

an arch, and that a throne is placed in heaven, and that
God sits upon it, and that, as if He were a commander or
judge, the angels stand round to obey His commands and
to be sent on different missions." Plainly for Jerome
the truth and meaning of the Ascension did not depend
upon such " nonsense."

Again the Fathers are many of them at pains to ex-
plain that " He sitteth at the right hand of God " was
certainly figurative, seeing that God has no right hand.

Lastly as regards Hades, whether it holds some special
position, as a part of or in relation to the earth, there
was a good deal of discussion in many circles and among
Christians in early times. There again it is hard to
believe that when St. Paul speaks of the dead as " sleep-
ing in Jesus " he was thinking of a pit underground.
There is a long and interesting discussion of the matter
in Gregory of Nyssa's de Anima et Resurrectione, where he
seems to follow Posidonius the Platonizing Stoic ; and
he reaches the conclusion " that the soul, being im-
material, is under no necessity to be detained in certain
portions of nature." Hades he explains to mean " the
invisible " (TO detSes), and " to go to Hades " the transla-
tion of the soul into the invisible.

I am not disputing the wide prevalence of merely
physical conceptions of heaven and hell such as Coperni-
can astronomy must have utterly overthrown. I am
only pleading that, even when no one doubted the
Ptolemaic astronomy, intelligent Christians did not fail
to see that heaven and hell were not spatial terms.

I have in Belief in God (pp. 272-273) spoken about the
Ascension of Christ as a physical fact which the apostles
saw, and of its spiritual significance, quite irrespective
of changes in our conception of the structure of the uni-
verse ; and (pp. 180-182) I have endeavoured to show
how illogical and unreasonable it is to argue that because
in the case of what lies outside possible human experience
we must be taught by symbols, therefore we can apply
the same symbolic interpretation to events, such as the
miracles connected with our Lord's person, which are
stated to have occurred within human experience and
have all their significance from having so actually
occurred.

<3)

TABLE OF SUBJECTS

CHAPTER I. The Jewish Background. The great question,
pp. 1-3. Where we start. The Jewish background,
3-4 ; taken for granted by Jesus and His disciples, 4^8.
Importance of this, because of (I) the Jewish doctrine
of God and its consequences, 8-11. (II) the expecta-
tion of the Kingdom of God, 11-14. (Ill) the features
of the Messianic expectation : (1) the universality of
Israel's religion, 15-16 ; (2) the doom of the world
powers, 16-17 ; (3) the King Messiah, 17-18 ; (4) the
New Covenant, the effusion of the Spirit and the Resurrec-
tion of the dead, 18-19 ; (5) Daniel's vision of the " one
like a son of man " developed in the Book of Enoch, 19-21.
The apocalyptic literature, 22-3 ; its limited influence,
24-5. The Jewish parties in our Lord's time, 25-7.

Notes. A. Traces of polytheism in O.T., 28-9.
B. The teaching of Zoroaster, 29-30. C. The belief
in the pre-existing Son of Man, 30-3.

CHAPTER II. The Belief of the First Disciple. Its gradual
development : (I) as interpreted by (1) Harnack,
pp. 35-6 ; (2) Schweitzer, 37-8 ; (3) Bousset and Kirsopp
Lake, 39-41 ; their common assumption, 41 ; the
trustworthiness of Synoptic Gospels and Acts, 41-3.
(II) The preparation in John the Baptist, 43-6. (Ill)
The impression on the disciples of the Galilaean ministry :
the title Son of Man, 46-7 ; the impression of authority
in word and work, 47-52 ; Aut deus aut homo non bonus,
52-3. (IV) The titles of Jesus : The Son of God, 54-7 ;
The Christ, 57-9 ; The Suffering Servant, 59-62 ; The
glorified Son of Man, 63-6. The failure of the disciples,
66-8.

Note on John the Baptist and Jesus, 68-9.
322

TABLE OF SUBJECTS 323

CHAPTER III. The Faith of the First Church The meaning
of the Cross, pp. 70-2. (I) The recovery of the disciples'
faith requires the actual resurrection, 73-4 ; the trust-
worthiness of the Acts, 74-6 ; the nature of the earliest
faith in Jesus as Lord, 76-8. Was it to end in a doctrine
of " deification " ? 78-9. (II) The influence of St. Paul :
the doctrine of the incarnation of the Son, 79-84 ; His
cosmic functions ; His Godhead implied or asserted,
85-6 ; sources of the doctrine, 86-90 ; accepted by the
other apostles, 90-1 ; the idea of the divine Wisdom,
92-4. (Ill) The Epistle to the Hebrews and its doctrine
of Christ, 94-7 ; in agreement with St. Paul, 97-9.

Notes. A. On the institution by Christ of the sacra-
ment of His body and blood, 99-102. B. On the question
whether the title Lord for Jesus was in use in the first
church in Jerusalem, 102-5. C. St. Paul's phrase,
" Christ after the flesh," 105.

CHAPTER IV. St. John and the Rest of the New Testament.
(I) Recent work on the Fourth Gospel Stanton, Meyer,
Burney : The use to be made of the Gospel, pp. 107-11 ;
its doctrine of Christ's person, 111-15 ; the sources of
the doctrine ; the historical memory ; the position of
the Prologue ; the Logos idea in Hellenism and its
influence among the Jews ; St. John's use of it, 115-19 ;
analysis of the prologue, 119-22. (II) The rest of the
N.T. : No positive " adoptionist " doctrine, 123-4 ;
the Revelation, 124-7 ; The Epistle of James, 127-30 ;
1 Peter, 130-2 ; Conclusion, 133.

Note on Reitzenstein's theory, 133-5.

CHAPTER V. The Apocalyptic Teaching of Jesus. The Messi-
anic expectation summarized, pp. 136-9. The cosmic
catastrophe in the prophets, 139-41 ; in the later apoca-
lypses, 141-2. The acceptance of the prophecies by
Jesus, 142-4. His teaching about the future coming
as immediate, 144-6. The doom upon Jerusalem,
146-8 ; thrown upon the background of cosmic catas-
trophe, 148-9. The Last Day really proclaimed, 150 ;
but nothing said about times or seasons ; the mistake of
the disciples ; the twofold character of Christ's teaching

324 TABLE OF SUBJECTS

about the Kingdom ; His profession of ignorance, 149-
55 ; the attitude of St. Paul and of the seer of the
Apocalypse, 155-6. Is the Gospel of the Kingdom for
this world or the next ? 156-60.

Note. An illustration from Tacitus, 160-1.

CHAPTER VI. Is the Doctrine of the Incarnation true ? Summary
of argument hitherto, pp. 162-4. (I) The positions of
Harnack, Schweitzer, and Bousset arbitrary and one-sided,
165-9 ; the true method of reply, 169. (II) The English
Modernists, 170-3. (Ill) The objection that we are
dehumanizing Christ and making His example unreal
considered, 173-9 ; the idea of an incarnation of God
in humanity with Christ for foremost specimen, 179-82 ;
conclusion, 182-183. (IV) Alleged moral defects in
Christ, 184-6 ; His supposed disclaimer of goodness,
186-8. (V) His alleged errors as to (1) the end of the
world, 188-9 ; (2) the activities of devils, 189-91 ; (3)
the books of the O.T., 191-3. Summary, 193-5.

CHAPTER VII. The Definitions of the Councils concerning the
Person of Christ. (I) Their relation to the books of the
N.T., pp. 196-8 ; the perilous position of the early
Church and the mistakes of its teachers, 198-203. (II)
The definition against Arius ; the teaching of Athanasius,
204-9. (Ill) The definition against Apollinarius, 209-11.

(IV) Against Nestorius, 211-13 ; its importance, 214-6.

(V) Against Eutyches and the Mono phy sites, 216-7.
The result at Chalcedon criticized, 217-8. Considera-
tions : (1) The dogmas negative, 218-9 ; but (2)
necessary, 219-20 ; and (3) in themselves unexception-
able, 220-2 ; but (4) abused in effect ; real humanity
of Christ obscured, 222-4 ; (5) the true use of them
the picture in the Gospels and the theory in St. Paul ;
the " self-emptying." Legitimate agnosticism, 224-6 ;
the juxtaposition of two consciousnesses in Christ
deprecated, 227 ; the meaning of an " impersonal man-
hood," 227-8.

Note. A. On the Shepherd of Hernias, Didache, etc.,
228-30. B. On the phrase Enliypostasia, 230.

TABLE OF SUBJECTS 325

CHAPTER VIII. The Implied Doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

(I) An outcome of the Christian experience, pp. 231-5.

(II) (1) The three distinguishable persons, 235-9 ; (2)
their mutual inclusiveness, 239-41. (Ill) The implied
doctrine difficult to formulate ; mistakes of early teachers;
final outcome, 241-4 ; supposed differences ; Dr. Rashdall
on St. Augustine and St. Thomas, 244-7. The rational
value of the doctrine for us, 248-53.

Note on the N.T. uses of Spirit and St. Paul's supposed
identification of Christ and the Spirit, 253-5.

CHAPTER IX. Sin and the Fall. Implied in the N.T., pp.
256-7. (I) The O.T. doctrine ; Christ's teaching ; the
rest of the N.T. ; 257-62. (II) The modem estimate
of man, 263-7. (Ill) The Bible theory finds the seat
of sin in the will. Rival theories : (1) the source of sin
in the body ; (2) sin equated with imperfection ; (3) the
doctrine of determinism, 267-72. (IV) The Fall of Man ;
supposed antagonism with science ; restatement ; St.
Paul's doctrine of the Old Adam and the New Man,
272-5 ; still tenable in substance ; inherited sinfulness,
275-7 ; the coherence of the Virgin Birth of Christ with
the conception of the Fall, 277-9.

CHAPTER X. The Atonement. (I) Preliminary considerations :
(1) no redemption except by being made actually god-
like, pp. 280-2 ; (2) God's willingness to forgive on no
other condition than repentance, 282-3 ; (3) the need
of atonement involved in the corporate method of re-
demption, 283-4 ; (4) so in the O.T., 284-5 ; (5) in our
Lord's teaching, 285-8 ; (6) in the Acts ; (7) in St.
Paul, 288-91 ; (8) in the rest of the N.T., 291-2. (II)
The appeal of the doctrine, 293-5 ; scandals obviated,
295-300. (Ill) The central idea of Reparation by the
Representative Man as the ground of the gospel of
forgiveness, 300-3.

Notes. A. On Dr. Rashdall's Idea of Atonement,
303-304. B. On two misinterpreted phrases of St. Paul,
304-5.
22

326 TABLE OF SUBJECTS

CHAPTER XI. Summary and Conclusion. (I) Summary,
306-12. (II) Certain " critical " opinions not sub-
stantiated, 312-13. (Ill) Theology must not be dis-
paraged ; the central question the Finality of Christ ;
not compatible with any estimate of His person except
the traditional one, 314-7. Finality and evolution ;
the meaning of the Ascension, 317-9 ; the Ascension
and Copernican astronomy, 319-21.

INDEX OF NAMES

Abelard, 293

Acts (of the Apostles), 6, 42, 73-

75, 77, 123, 236-7, 261, 288
^Eschylus, 4

Alexander (Bp. of Alex.), 205
Alexander (the Great), 20
Alfasi (Rabbi Isaac), 140
Anastasius, 212
Anselra, 293

Antiochus Epiphanes, 17 n., 20
Apollinarius (of Laodicea), 209-

211, 230

Aquinas 'St. Thomas), 245, 247
Aristotle, 12
Arius, 204-209
Arnou (Dr. Rene), 9 n., 10 n.
Athanasius (St.), 207-209, 219,

223, 245
Augustine (St.), 8, 158 n., 174,

245, 246, 291
Aurelian (Emp.), 203
Aytoun (Rev. R. B.), 61 n.

Baker (Prof. Bethune), 4, 5, 173
Balfour (Lord), 222
Barnabas (Ep. of), 198
Bevan (Edwyn), 9 n., 14 n., 30,

315
Bousset (Wilhelm), 10, 39, 46 n., |

47 n., 99, 102 n., 104, 165, 169 I
Box (Dr.), 31 n., 128
Brahma, 231
Bright (Dr.), 208 n.
Buddha (The), 176, 318
Burkitt (Dr.), 74, 115 n., 197
Burney (Dr.), 69, 107 n., 115 n.,

120 n., 121 n., 122 n., 125 n.,

254
Byron (Lord), 263

Calvin (John), 293

Campbell (McLeod), 293

Carlyle (Thomas), 207

Cave (Dr. Sydney), 29

Charles (Dr.), 21 n., 23, 32, 65 n.,

141 n.

Chase (Dr.), 120 n., 132 n., 254
Clark (Lowther), 7 n.
Clement (Alex.), 10, 274 n., 320
Clement (of Rome), 198, 235
Constantine, 205
Creed ( J. M. ), 44 n.
Croce (Benedetto), 13
Cyril (St.), 212, 214, 227

Dale (Dr.), 293

Dalman (G.), 31, 55 n., 56 n.,

62 n., 66 n., 88 n., 103, 189 n.
Daniel (Book of), 19, 20, 32, 63,

65, 141 n., 145, 147, 149
Davidson (Dr. A. B.), 28
De La Mazeliere, 232 n.
Denney (Dr.), 293
Diodore (of Tarsus), 211
Dionysius (Pseudo-) 247
Driver (Dr.), 28, 59, 61 n.

Edward VI (King), 297
Eleazer (the Martyr), 286 n.
Emmet (Dr.), 185 n.
Enoch (Similitudes of the Book

of), 20, 21, 24, 31-33, 37, 63,

65, 87, 313
Epicurus, 9
Erasmus, 223
Essenes (the), 25, 26 n.
Esther (Book of), 16, 17 n.
Euripides, 295

327

328

Eusebius, 147 n.
Eutyches, 216

INDEX OF NAMES

Gamaliel, 80
Glazebrook (Dr.), 320
Glover (T. R.), 102 n.
Goethe, 116
Gregory (of Nyssa), 321

Hanson (Rev. Richard), 171 n.
Hnrnack (Adolph), 7, 10 n., 23,

35, 49 n., 56 n., 109 n., 159,

165, 166-168, 204 n., 207 n.,

208 n., 244

Harris (Dr. Charles), 30, 320 n.
Harris (Dr. J. Rendel), 122, 229 I
Headlam (Dr.), 82 n., 86 n., i

91 n., 230, 287 n.
Hebrews (Epistle to the), 6, 94-

97, 133, 164, 292. 309
Heracleitus (Pseudo-), 262 n.
Hermas, 198, 200, 228, 242
Hermes (Trismegistus), 134
Herodians (the), 25, 26
Hoffding (Dr. K.), 30
Holland (Dr. H. 8.). 69, 121 n.
Hort (Dr.), 86 n., 128 n., 129 n.,

130, 156 n., 180 n., 239, 249,

254, 291 n.

Hugel (Baron Fnedrich von), 4
Huxley (Prof.), 232 n., 249, 318

Ignatius, 198

Inge (Dean), 10 n., 99, 120 n.

Irenaeus, 274 n.

Isaiah, 14, 15, 17 n.,59, 139, 141

Jackson (Dr Foakes), 5 n., 14n.,

21 n., 32, 39 n., 44 n., 46 n.
James (St.), 6, 127-130, 179 n.,

262, 291 n.
Jerome, 320
John (St.), 6 n., 40, 68, 71 n., 91,

106-122, 143 n., 155, 163, 181,

194, 235, 240, 254, 260, 278,

288, 292, 312, 315, 318
John the Baptist (St.), 1 n., 25,

43, 47, 54, 68, 119, 142, 152,

180, 258, 288

John (the Presbyter), 107 n., 124
Jona (Robbi), 140
Josephus, 26, 43, 44 D., 70 n., 127

Jowett (Benjamin), 271
Jude (St.), 21, 130, 234, 291 n.
Justin (Mart.), 200, 242 n.

Kidd(Dr.), 213 n., 230, 242 n.
Knox ^Capt. H. V.), 271 n.
Krebs (E), 134

Lagrange (Pere), 21 n., 32, 140 n.
Lake (Dr. Kirsopp), 5 n., 14 n.,

21 n., 32, 39, 44 n., 46 n., 47 n.,

169, 172, 316
Latham (Dr.), 69
Lebreton (Jules), 10 n., 88 n.
Leo (Bp.), 216, 293
Leontius (Byzant.), 230
Liberty (Stephen), 26 n.
Lightfoot (Dr.), 82 n., 84 n., 85 n.
Loisy, 37
Lotze, 253

Lowrie (Walter), 37 n.
Lucian (of Antioch), 204, 211
Luke (St.), 42, 43, 46, 61, 73-75,

103, 145 n., 151, 154, 181, 278

Man ili us, 9 n.

Marcion, 7, 291

Mark (St.), 41, 43, 45, 46, 62,

74, 151, 154, 184, 189
Matthew (St.), 43, 46, 57, 144,

149, 151, 152 n., 154, 234, 278
Maurice (F. D.), 190
Menzies (Dr. Allan), 83, 84 n., 105
Meyer (Eduard), 30, 42, 73 n.,

81 n., 100 n., 107 n., 134
Milton (John), 273
Mnason, 74

Moberly (Dr.), 293, 297
Moorhouse (Dr.), 145 n.
Morris (William), 111 n.

Nestorius (Bp.), 212-216, 224

Origen, 9, 10 n., 54 n., 201, 209,
243, 244, 293, 320

Papias, 74 n.

Parry (Dr.), 86 n., 129 n., 156 n.

Paul (St.), 6, 8, 11, 24, 40, 55,
73, 75, 78-94, 98-101, 104,
105, 114, 144, 155, 162, 167,

INDEX OF NAMES

329

181, 194, 197, 225, 233, 237, i

239, 262, 268, 273, 278, 288- I

291, 299, 301-305, 308, 312, i

315, 318
Paul (of Samosata), 123, 133,

164, 202
Peter (St.), 2, 6, 42, 45, 57,59, 72, !

76, 130-132, 175, 234, 262, 291
Pharisees (the), 25, 26
Philip (St.), 74, 236, 288
Philo, 88, 97, 117
Plato, 4, 320
Plotinus, 10, 12
Posidonius, 321
Prophets (of Israel), 14-25, 138-

142

Proverbs (Book of), 91, 122
Psalms (the), 22, 55
Psalms of Solomon, 18, 25, 32, i

64

Q, 42, 109 n., 166

Rackham (R. B.), 75, 86 n.,

145 n.

Raleigh (Walter), 267
Rashdall (Dr.), 30, 51 n., 89 n.,

101, 201 n., 207 n., 208 n.,

235 n., 245 n., 246, 288 n.,

290 n., 293, 296 n., 303, 304
Reitzenstein (Richard), 122 n.,

133

Relton (Dr. H. M.), 230
Revelation (of St. John the

Divine), 124-127, 292
Richmond (Canon), 240 n.
Robertson (Bp.), 88 n., 20 4 n.,

208 n.
Robinson (Dr. Armitage), 121 n.,

242 n.

Romans (Epistle to the), 289
Rousseau (J. J.), 263
Ruskin (J.), 140

Sacred Books of the East, 30
Sadducees (the), 25, 26
Salmon (Dr.), 101
Sanday (Dr.), 51 n., 82, 86 n.,

91 n., 170, 287 n.
Schweitzer (Alb.), 37, 39, 44 n.,

102, 151, 159, 165, 168
Scott (Dr. Anderson), 100
Shakespeare (William), 265-267
Shelley (P. B.), 116, 263
Sidgwick (Prof. Henry), 137 n.
Simkhovitch (Prof. Vladimir),

21 n., 26 n., 27 n., 49
Somervill (D. C.). 108 n., Ill n.
Stanton (Dr.), 30, 100, 107-110,

115

Stephen (St.), 77
Strabo, 93 n.
Streeter (Dr.), 320
Swete (Dr.), 126 n., 242 n.

Tacitus, 160
Tertullian, 201, 245
Theodore (of Mopsuetia), 211
Theodoret, 224
Tixeront (Pere), 245 n.
Treherne (Thomas), 12
Trench, 85 n.

Victorinus (Afer), 346, 252 n.

Weiss (Dr. John), 265 n.
Westcott /Dr.), 85 n., 96 n.,

112 n., 156 n., 256
Wisdom (Book of), 55, 91, 92,

116, 122, 126, 180, 309, 313
Wordsworth (William), 116

Zahn, 120 n.
Zealots (the), 26, 27
Zenobia (Queen of Palmyra),

202
Zoroaster, 4, 13 n., 29, 318

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